Re: [Closed REQ 6112]: Geomview solaris -mp?

[daemon]

I think it's pretty safe to say No, we won't integrate multiprocessor
support into Geomview.  I'd expect it to be a good deal of work to make
this happen, and there's not much in the way of background computation in
geomview that could naturally live in a separate thread -- if it's slow,
it's mostly graphics-limited.

We've tried running geomview on UltraSparcs with their Creator3D graphics card
via a Sun OpenGL library, and find it's much faster.
So if Sun does come out with an OpenGL library for the Sparc20,
and you have some hardware graphics accelerator on it, then compiling
it there might help.

We've heard from someone with a dual-processor Linux machine (hwb) that he
finds that Savi and geomview share the load nicely, keeping both CPUs busy.
I don't really understand this -- SaVi seems to take a good deal less
CPU time than geomview on these large models -- but it's nice if it works.

In SaVi's case, it appears that there's a substantially more efficient way to
represent (in geomview) the zillions of pointlike satellites.
Graphics speed increases by a factor of 2 on a Sparc-10 here when
I make a mocked-up streamlined version.  I've mentioned this to Patrick;
maybe he can incorporate this optimization at some point.

By the way, are you using the "geomview -opengl" version or the plain one?
geomview -opengl will do texture mapping, but it's about 2x slower than
the non-texture-mapping version.  And I think SaVi now includes two earth
models: one texture-mapped one, and another that includes just
continent outlines which can use either version of geomview.

  Stuart Levy, Geometry Center