[vtk-developers] performance with large number of actors

[Mark Beall]

Hi everyone,
VTK has pretty severe performance problems when trying to display
a large number of actors. As soon as you get above several hundred
actors, the performance drops rapidly versus displaying the same
data in a single actor, pretty quickly reaching a factor of 10 or more 
less than what it should be. You can find some specific details of this
posted to the vtkusers list last year.

In any case we're on a small mission (which will hopefully only last
a couple of weeks) to improve this situation. We've done enough
perliminary work to show that this problem isn't anything inherent
in how vtk works, but, for the most part, just details of how
things are implemented. It's also not just a single issue, but
a collection of things that affect performance in different ways
on different platforms.

However, we would like some help from the vtk community in doing this.
As I said there are a number of issues (at least 4 major ones) that we
have identified. For each of these I will post a description of the
problem and our proposed solution(s) (which could range from none to
several depending on the problem). We would very much like feedback on
what people think of the solution and any suggestions on how to make it
better.

mark