Johannes Kepler Universit at Linz Spezialforschungsbereich F013 Graphical and Arithmetical Benchmarking of Workstations Fonds Zur F Orderung Der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung Graphical and Arithmetical Benchmarking of Workstations

This paper summarizes the results of a series of performance tests carried out as part of an evaluation of diierent graphics workstations. The graphics performance was determined by Viewperf 5.1. In addition, we present some results of a relatively simple graphics benchmark, which measures the raw performance with regard to Gouraud-shading. In order to get a good estimation of the processing power under real world conditions, a multi-grid software package was executed on all machines. 1 Systems and their connguration In this report we investigate the graphics and processor performance of three contemporary commercial graphics workstations. In addition, we will also compare these machines with an ordinary mainstream PC. 1.1.1 Connguration processor MIPS R10000 clockrate 250Mhz L1 cache size 32KB for instructions, 32KB for data L2 cache size 1MB for instructions and data spec95 integer / oating point 13.6 / 24 execution units / max. simultaneaus issues 5 / 5 pipe-stages (integer, load/store, fp) 5 / 6 / 7 main memory 640MB SDRAM number of processors 2 width of the data-bus | width of the address-bus | system interconnection system 7x7 crossbar graphics subsystem MXE with 4MB texture cache operating system Irix 6.4 1.1.2 Remarks Silicon Graphics, inc. claims that their Octane/MXE ooers the most powerful desktop graphics available, providing unmatched realism and polygon performance. However, a direct head-to-head comparison with the two competitors Sun and HP has shown that SGI's Octane/MXE ooers a relatively low graphics performance in the case of large Gouraud-shaded surfaces, only textured surfaces are drawn at high speed. The MXE graphics subsystem consists of two geometry-accelerators providing a peak performance of 1.344 GGops each, and two rasterizers that deliver together a peak ll rate of approximately 240 million Gouraud-shaded pixels per second. In spite of its texturing capabilities it provides only a 4MB texture-cache on the graphics board. This leads to a notable loss in performance if the desired textures do not t into the small cache.