SPECperfview CATIA Tests

SPECviewperf is a portable OpenGL performance benchmark program written in C. It was developed by IBM. Later updates and significant contributions were made by SGI, Digital (Compaq, HP), 3Dlabs (Creative Labs) and other SPECopc project group members. SPECviewperf provides a vast amount of flexibility in benchmarking OpenGL performance. Currently, the program runs on most implementations of UNIX, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Linux.

SPECviewperf parses command lines and data files, sets the rendering state, and converts data sets to a format that can be traversed using OpenGL rendering calls. It renders the data set for a pre-specified amount of time or number of frames with animation between frames. Finally, it outputs the results. SPECviewperf reports performance in frames per second. Other information about the system under test - all the rendering states, the time to build display lists (if applicable), and the data set used - are also output in a standardized report.

A "benchmark" using SPECviewperf is really a single invocation of SPECviewperf with command-line options telling the SPECviewperf program which data set to read in, which texture file to use, what OpenGL primitive to use to render the data set, which attributes to apply and how frequently, whether or not to use display lists, and so on. One quickly realizes that there are an infinite number of SPECviewperf "benchmarks" (an infinite number of data sets multiplied by an almost infinite number of command-line states).

The catia-02 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the CATIA V5R12 application from Dassault Systemes. Three models are measured using various modes in CATIA. Phil Harris of LionHeart Solutions, developer of CATBench2003, supplied SPEC/GPC with the models used to measure the CATIA application. The models are courtesy of CATBench2003 and CATIA Community.

The car model contains more than two million points. SPECviewperf replicates the geometry represented by the smaller engine block and submarine models to increase complexity and decrease frame rates. After replication, these models contain 1.2 million vertices (engine block) and 1.8 million vertices (submarine).

State changes as made by the application are included throughout the rendering of the model, including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application. The state changes put considerably more stress on graphics subsystems than the simple geometry dumps found in older SPECviewperf viewsets.

In our performance comparison tests, there was very little disparity between processors. While the majority of the CATIA testing is graphics bound, it also relies heavily on efficient processor architecture. Beginning our chart is the AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE 2.8GHz, which scored a weighted geometric mean of 15.31 on average. Next was the X4 810 2.6GHz processor, with an average score of 14.25 which falls only 7.4% behind the X3 720. Next is the X4 940 BE 3.0GHz processor with 15.74, which was 2.8% better than the triple-core 720. Last was the Intel Core i7-920, which scored an average 17.43, which figures to roughly 10.7% improvement over the Black Edition X4 940. As an indicator for graphics penalty, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 was used for the final test, and scored 16.33 for a differnce of -6.7% in performance.

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