Description: WizMark is a 3D performance benchmark created by 3Dfx Interfactive, Inc. that measures the perfomance of Microsoft's Direct3D and 3D hardware accelerators. The benchmark utlizes essential 3D rendering features which provide enhanced visual realism including Gouraud shading, perspective correct texture-mapping, Gouraud texture modulation, texture bilinear filtering, texture LOD mip mapping, alpha-blending, and Z-buffering.
Description: The ATEST sample was created to let developers experiment with transparency effects using alpha polygons. The sample starts with a standard blue sphere and Src Alpha and Dest Alpha menus. Choosing Src Alpha=SrcAlpha and Dest Alpha=InvSrcAlpha produces the standard transparent effect.
Description: BEES demonstrates two effects; emmisive materials and swarming behavior. The emmissive material effect creates the illusion that an object is glowing. Swarming behavior makes individual objects appear to act as a group, producing an intriguing effect.
Description: D-LIGHT makes it possible to manipulate colored light sources in real-time. In the D-LIGHT sample, a single sphere moves along a path over the viewport, which contains black dots. The black dots represent light sources. As the sphere approaches, the dots activate and color the sphere.
Description: Lens flares are indispensable in a variety of simulations. Whether it's sunlight glinting off the windshield on a car in a racing sim, reflecting off the canopy of a plane in a flying sim, or flashing off the skin of a rocket in a space sim, this effect is a great visual enhancement. FLARE shows how to use alpha textures to produce a lens flare.
Descriptions: FLIPA was created to demonstrate the use of alpha textures. Similar to ATEST, it uses the standard spinning cube instead of a sphere. FLIPA allows you to turn on alpha, specify an alpha texture, and then use the Src Alpha and Dest Alpha menus to specify alpha blending modes. Choosing the standard Src Alpha=SrcAlpha and Dest Alpha=InvSrcAlpha causes the cube to become transparent as a result of the use of the alpha channel in the textures.
Description: FOG demonstrates both a rolling fractal terrain and the use of fog effects to hide the "edge of the terrain". Edge-of-the-terrain effects typically lead to "popping" unless hidden by fog or haze. Alpha fade is another technique that can be used to hide edge effects.
Description: MIPMAP is a texturing technique used to provide multiple levels of texture detail. The MIPMAP sample shows how to do create this effect. It also provides a graphic demonstration of the resulting improvement in quality by presenting a side-by-side presentation of both a mipmapped and un mipmapped object.
Description: One way to simulate complex objects is the use of colorkeyed billboards. This sample uses TREES to show how colorkeyed billboards work. The TREES sample also demonstrates the how simple shadows can be created using a similar technique combined with alpha blending.
Description: Tests a 3D cards DirectDraw capablities. While this benchmark is very old, people still turn to it for a baseline reference score for measuring DirectDraw performance. Scores are measured in frames-per-second.
Description: OpenGVS is a cross-platform computer image generation applications programming interface (API) that runs on top of OpenGL, Direct3D (in the works), or SGL. The benchmark gives a final "score" (average frame rate) and a test report header that identifies the specific hardware system configuration under review including significant and relevant rendering factors used during the test such as total number of polygons in entire scene, total number of objects (and subobjects) in the entire scene, total number of CPUs used by the application test and total number and sizes of all texture maps loaded with the test scene.
