[vtkusers] Slow rendering in VTK 4.4

[Geir Arne Tangen]

Hi all !

When switching from VTK 4.2 official release to VTK 4.4 interim release we
are experiencing real slow rendering in our VTK based application.

I have run Sebastien Barre´s "sphere-bench" application and the results
show a huge difference in performance between the two VTK versions (see 
below).

My system is Mac OSX ver. 10.3.5 "Panther".

Have anyone else seen this loss of performance in VTK 4.4 ?

Regards
Geir Arne Tangen

Sphere-bench results VTK 4.2 :
----------------------------------------
Best results, summary :
  - Power Macintosh running Darwin 7.5.0
  - VTK 4.2.6 (rev: 1.1495, 2003/02/18 03:45:04)
  - CarbonOpenGL
  - Visual is 1280x1024, truecolor/truecolor/24
  - Tcl/Tk 8.4.2
  - window was 700 x 700
   1) 256x256 : 26083.7 kpolys/s : [stripper]
   2) 256x256 : 17038.3 kpolys/s : [small_sphere]
   3) 256x256 : 17036.5 kpolys/s : [transparency]
   4) 256x256 : 17033.8 kpolys/s : []
   5) 256x256 : 14840.9 kpolys/s : [texture, transparency]
   6) 256x256 : 14831.3 kpolys/s : [texture]
   7) 256x256 :  695.5 kpolys/s : [wireframe]

------- DONE (in 14 sec.) -------

Sphere-bench results VTK 4.4 :
-----------------------------------------
Best results, summary :
  - Power Macintosh running Darwin 7.5.0
  - VTK 4.4.2 (rev: 1.1782, 2003/12/17 02:45:35)
  - CarbonOpenGL
  - Visual is 1280x1024, truecolor/truecolor/24
  - Tcl/Tk 8.4.2
  - window was 700 x 700
   1) 256x256 : 27365.3 kpolys/s : [stripper]
   2) 256x256 :  721.8 kpolys/s : [texture, transparency]
   3) 256x256 :  721.1 kpolys/s : [texture]
   4) 256x256 :  696.4 kpolys/s : []
   5) 256x256 :  696.4 kpolys/s : [wireframe]
   6) 256x256 :  696.3 kpolys/s : [transparency]
   7) 256x256 :  696.0 kpolys/s : [small_sphere]

------- DONE (in 50 sec.) -------