Sharon Rose Clay
Silicon Graphics Computer Systems

Real-time entertainment applications are very sensitive to image quality, performance, and system cost. Graphics workstations provide full product lines with a full range of price points and performance options. At the high end, they provide many traditional Image Generator features such as real-time texture mapping and full scene antialiasing. They can also support many channels, or players, per workstation to offset the cost of getting the high-end features. At the low end, they have entry prices and performance that are often competitive with PCs. Graphics workstations can provide a very powerful, flexible solution with a rich development environment. Additionally, because of binary compatibility across product lines and standards in graphics APIs, graphics workstations offer the possibility of portability of both applications and databases to different and future architectures. However, this power and flexibility increases the complexity for achieving the full quoted performance from such a machine. This paper presents a strategy for performance for developing and tuning real-time graphics applications on graphics workstations.

The following topics are covered:

• typical application requirements for graphics workstations

• multi-processing issues for graphics subsytems

• graphics workstation pipelines and performance trade-offs

• strategies for diagnosing pipeline bottlenecks

• database structure for traversal

• designing and tuning a real-time application

• run-time diagnostics and load-management strategies

• tools for debugging graphics performance

Developing a designed-for-performance application requires understanding the potential performance problems, identifying which factors are limiting performance, and then making the trade-offs to achieve maximum frame rate with the highest quality scene content.