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February 1996

Optimization for Real-Time Graphics Applications

Sharon Rose Clay
Silicon Graphics Computer Systems

Table Of Contents

for single files-per-section

1. Introduction
2. Background
   • Why Tune?
   • Getting Started: Assessing Requirements and Predicting Performance
   • A Typical Frame
   • Graphics Architectures
3. Multi-Processing for High-Performance Graphics
   • Methods of Multiprocessing
   • Pipelining vs. Parallelism
4. Performance Issues in Graphics Pipelines
   • The Rendering Pipeline
   • The CPU Subsystem (Host)
   • Database Traversal
   • Immediate Mode Drawing Traversal
   • Display List Traversal
   • Retained Database Traversal
   • Graphics Subsystems
   • The Geometry Subsystem
   • The Raster Subsystem
   • Bus Bandwidth
   • Video Refresh
   • Dealing with Latency
5. Optimizing Performance of a Graphics Pipeline
   • Design For Performance
   • Selecting Features
   • Designing Tasks
   • Estimating Performance for a Pipeline
   • Measuring Performance and Writing Benchmarks
   • Finding the Bottlenecks
6. Tuning the Application
   • Tuning the Renderer
   • Efficient Coding
   • Multiprocessing
7. Database Tuning
   • Spatial Hierarchy Balanced with Scene Complexity
   • Database Instancing
   • Balancing the Traversals
   • Modeling to the Graphics Pipeline
8. Real-Time On a Workstation
   • Managing System Resources for Real-Time
   • Real-Time Graphics
   • Load Management
   • Multiple Machines
9. Tuning Tools
   • Graphics Tuning Tools
   • System Tuning Tools
   • Real-Time Diagnostics
10. Conclusion
11. Acknowledgments
12. References