Hardware Acceleration

[Robert Riviere]

Andrew,

> How does one determine whether a vtk program is using hardware acceleration
> or not? 

I'd say make run our sphere-benchmark and if your rendering speed 
is greater than ~100,000 triangles / second you probably have an 
hardware acceleration :-)

> Assuming that my card is capable of accelerating OpenGL rendering
> (which I'm not sure it can), do I have to specify somewhere in my code to
> render my scene in hardware as opposed to using "software rendering"?

It's often more a driver problem than a VTK problem. You may want to 
open the "Properties" item of your Windows display.

> If I were to acquire a 3D card to improve rendering speed for vtk, what kind
> of features should I be looking for?  

In our sphere-benchmark results database we store performance data 
about flat shading, texture mapping and transparency for about 60 
platforms. You may want to take a look to :

http://www.inria.fr/caiman/personnel/Robert.Riviere/vtk/sphere-bench/

the sphere benchmark is at :

http://www.hds.utc.fr/~barre/vtk/sphere-bench.html

Greetings, 

-- 
Robert Riviere (Robert.Riviere at sophia.inria.fr)	    Tel: .4-92-38-7906
CERMICS	/ INRIA					    Fax: .4-92-38-7740
BP 93                              06902	Sophia Antipolis Cedex
C'est quoi Perl ? - Perl, c'est : idoine.



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