And now, benchmarks YOU can run

I've been promising people I'd put together webstart and source versions of the Quake3 benchmark app for a while now. Finally this weekend the planets aligned, the stars crossed and I was able to make time.

First, a peek at the results I got on my test rig (P4 3.2Ghz WinXP box with a Radeon x850 XT platinum.) You'll notice I set up to test 3 apis, one in two different modes (xith in jogl mode and in lwjgl mode.) Unfortunately, xith in lwjgl mode did not run due to what looked like a thread programming error in the api (opengl being accessed outside the thread holding the opengl context), so that column remained empty. :-/

Here's the raw numbers as an open office file.

And here's a few charts for the visually inclined:






Now, what you've been waiting for... A chance to run the benchmarks yourself. Sorry, I only packed them for windows (and speaking of being lazy, I used a pretty nifty tool called jnlp wrapper from Duck Creek Software to do it as well.) The source is also provided. In the case of the xith test, the source is part of their distribution, so I'm only including the main file (which I've altered slightly to spit out data in the same format as the other tests.)

EDIT: jME and Xith *should* now work on PPC Macs and x86 Linux as well and windows. Java3D will now work with x86 Linux as well.

1. Java3d - (run) (src) (api homepage)


2. jMonkeyEngine - (run) (src) (api homepage)


3. Xith3D - (run) (src) (api homepage)

I suggest you have Java 1.5 or above (be aware that 1.5.0_07 has caused me issues.)

Enjoy!

Free Hugs

I can't watch this video without getting all emotional. For some reason I keep watching it anyway. Must be getting old.

F.E.A.R.

Just beat F.E.A.R.... pretty good game, very spooky at times.

I think the only bad part about being a software developer in the gaming industry is that I can't help looking at the visuals in a game and picking them apart. "Hmm, how did they do the lighting here?" "Wonder if they are using VBO or display lists..." Ah well.

Today's thought

For all the points upon a compass, there is but one direction we all will travel... and Time, the only measure.

Fun with jME and BSP

I've been playing again lately with the old benchmark BSP/Q3 level loader code I posted about back in January. Mostly I've been revisiting the topic because some of the latest work we've done in jME have resulted in nice upgrades in speed and xith3d has been working on their implementation as well. Another benchmark jME-Java3d-vs-Xith3d test is soon to come - this time with webstarts and src for the interested.

After some tweaking, I have the loader working well enough to load in lots of free Quake3 levels from the net. Here's a few example shots of the level "Obiwan's House" and a movie for the curious (click for larger versions):







Please note that this level does not seem to define occlusion, so no portals, occlusion culling, etc. is going on. Still, the frame rate is quite nice. :)

The movie file is here. You'll need the DivX codec (6.2.5) which you can get here.