[vtkusers] How to visualize thousands of actors with good performance

[Bill Lorensen]

I just ran a small test on VTK4.4, VTK5.0, VTK5.2 and VTK Head. All
built Release

Rendered 10000 randomly distributed spheres. Ignore the absolute times
(I have an old hand-me-down). All reported in frames per second (FPS):

Version  MultipleActors  Single Actor
4.4.2             .51 FPS         .6 FPS
5.0.4           1.24 FPS       5.9   FPS
5.2.1             .92 FPS       6.0   FPS
Head             .88 FPS       5.9   FPS

So, in this test, I don't see degradation in the 5.x releases. It is
interesting that 4.4.2 does not benefit from a single actor. But,
also, the performance has improved from 4.4 to present. Affolter's
pipeline must be different I think.

I've attached my test code. Sorry for it being somewhat ugly (it has
memory leaks), but I wanted something that would compile on all of the
releases.

Bill

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Pascal Augustin
<pascal at rogue-research.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> I'd just like to know the alternatives (if any), before I consider rewriting our selection and highlighting mechanism... It would really be great, if we could find a solution to this.
>
>  In your particular situation, would it be possible to use a single mapper for all your objects? Perhaps it could be a viable solution. For example, if you wanted to show 10000 spheres, you could do:
>
> 1) 10000 actors, 10000 mappers -> very slow
> 2) 1 actor, 1 mapper -> very fast
> 3) 10000 actors, 1 mapper -> acceptable speed
>
> Pascal
>
>
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