Thursday, November 15, 2007

New 3d benchmark work

There is an industry standard benchmark for measuring overall system performance that we (as well as everyone in the, uh, industry) use for our own benchmarking, competitive analysis, etc.

It's made up of multiple suites, and one of the suites is a 3D subsystem test, but it is 3D in name only. It loads a scene in a popular 3D application...and renders it to a file. Basically, it is a CPU stress test. Great for processor scaling...not so great for 3D graphics, as the benchmark result scales with processor frequency and cache and not with the graphics chipset.

I'm working on developing a new 3D suite, and one of the subtest will be a cityscape with airships, roads, etc. It's in its infancy, but here are some preliminary shots. No lighting, no textures, and these are only four city "tiles."



My plan is to duplicate these tiles with rotation and some tweaking, as well as add some larger buildings and skyscrapers to break up the skyline.

Here is a shot from within 3D Studio MAX. I'm using the built-in Polygon Counter and I've highlighted one of the original tiles. Each tile is 27080 polygons, with the set of four reaching 108320 polygons.



I'm not sure how close I'll get to this level of buildings, but I definitely want to make an effort on texturing so they'll hold up to observation while the scene is playing.

4 comments:

Michael said...

That's pretty sweet dude! Now we need pump that file into an automated foam carving laser dodad to make instant terrain with.

Then, your next project will be to make fantasy terrain.

I'll talk to your boss and make sure your schedule is clear. I can't wait!

Trey said...

I'm not sure he'll share your level of enthusiasm, but let's go for it!

Anonymous said...

So how will you actually test the graphics card on the machine. Will you just play the scene in a DirectX view or and OpenGL view in Max. This should be fun. The problem will be your scene will fall apart when you have two many polys and textures. Were you just going to do a nice path animation across the scene? Also how are you going to gather details about your scene as you render it to display.

Just some thoughts.

John

Trey said...

The way this benchmark works is it is just timed playback or script execution. What I can get MAX to do is play a scene without skipping frames, and the faster the graphics card the faster the scene can go.

I want my scene to have a lot of polys - it should chug through with integrated graphics but fly with high-end consumer graphics.