Subject:
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Re: Hey everyone stop and check this new LDVIEW like app
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Sat, 9 Feb 2002 08:11:14 GMT
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Viewed:
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570 times
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In lugnet.cad, Kyle McDonald writes:
> Like all Java stuff... It's getting faster all the time. J3d 1.3 is
> much better.
Yah, I acknowledge that readily. But I'm still going to assert that it's
not yet ready for prime time. ;-)
Don't get me wrong -- I'm a big fan of Java. My dream job is to get paid
again for rolling Swing GUIs! :-9 But my experiences with Java3D (even
1.3, checked it out last week, trying to uninstall it even as we speak) has
been disappointing when there's no hardware acceleration.
> I'm assuming you read the answer to the question you refer to below?
> It's relatively easy to lower the priority of the rendering thread.
> Some apps do this others don't.
Sure I read it. I've also installed Java3D, and run the examples, and
modified a few to change the thread priority. Its performance is still
sluggish.
My box isn't a speed demon, but it's no slouch either. I'm running a K6-500
with 192 Mb of RAM...and no 3D accelerator card. The only other machine I
have to test it on is a 1.4GHz P4 with 512 Mb of RAM and some GeForce
something-or-other video card -- so of course it'll run fast on that.
But I suspect that Java3D is better geared towards a smallish number of flat
surfaces with bitmap textures and nifty alpha blending (a la most 3d video
games today) and not so good with very-largish numbers of small polygons
(80% of which have this nasty habit of overlapping). Unfortunately, LDraw
fits squarely in the latter category. Witness the unusually high memory
requirements and rendering times for even medium-sized LDraw models.
And yet, it's not that difficult to optimize a renderer for DAT viewing
(assuming you're writing the renderer). So clearly, there's a disparity there.
I think Java3D has potential to be useful for LDraw stuff *eventually*, but
not just right now, especially not on medium-rate systems like mine.
> It is also designed to yield the CPU to what ever else needs it.
> Will it use 100% of the CPU if nothing else is waiting? yes.
> What's wrong with that? As soon as some other thread as something
> to do the frame rate slows, and the other threads run. It's
> pretty flexible. (it's kinda like being 'nice'd in UNIX.)
Well, great and flexible on true operating systems, e.g. Win NT where things
actually multitask, but not so hot on the 16-bit versions of Windows like
this deadbeat Win98-thingy on my laptop. (1) Once it gets 100% of my
processer, it refuses to give it up. Or, like my friend observed, "That
processer ain't pegged, it's nailed right to the freaking wall!" :-,
Cheers,
- jsproat
1. Just a bit of pent-up-frustration angst there; I'd be running Win2k if
there were drivers for this box...
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Hey everyone stop and check this new LDVIEW like app
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| (...) I gues that depend son your definition of primetime :) (...) You used to get paid for that? Cool. ;^) (...) I'm not much better off. I've got a P3-600 in my laptop, but it's got only some 2.5MB trident dumb video chip. No 3D here either. I've (...) (23 years ago, 9-Feb-02, to lugnet.cad)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Hey everyone stop and check this new LDVIEW like app
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| Sproaticus wrote: > > I tend to avoid any Java3D stuff, since its performance is abysmally crummy. > And considering that it needs to peg the processor at 100% utilization (1) > to get that fast, you gotta wonder how slow it would be when you (...) (23 years ago, 9-Feb-02, to lugnet.cad)
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