Re: OGL and vrml browsers

steve ([email protected])
Thu, 1 Jun 1995 17:18:54 GMT0BST

> Dear Daeron and the rest of the list. (Especially you browserbuilders) I have
> a problem with opengl. The problem is that on PCs opengl tends to be slow (100
> mhz p5 with 32 megs RAM) Now I do have a hardware accelerator for my Matrox
> impression plus. At Matrox they are saying that they want to support opengl at
> a future date however I should expect about 40k polys a seconf on that system.
> Using the rendermorphics library I would (according to rendermorphics!) be
> able to push 300k polys a sec (My pentium can benchmarked in C (haven't tried
> asm) only push about 200k polys a sec). With such differences it makes me
> wonder if it would be worth it to translate from opengl to rendermorphics
> specs on the fly and use that.

VRML does NOT depend on OpenGL and therefore is is quite possible for
browsers to be built using the renderMorphics RL toolkit (and I
believe such browsers are being built right now).

Take care when evaluating accelerator boards. The number of
polygons/second does not really matter - check out the pixel fill
rate, which is a better figure to judge *real* performance. A recent
hardware OGL board for (NT) PC's has excellent polygon throughput,
but terrible pixel fill rate for texturing; basically this board, (marketed
as a texturing engine) will not texture any complex scene without grinding
to a halt !

=========================
Steve Ghee ( [email protected] ) <<= NOTE : new email address
Director of Technology

Division Ltd
19 Apex Court
Woodlands
Almondsbury
Bristol, UK
BS12 4JT
Tel : +44 1454 615554
Fax : +44 1454 615532
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