I guess I had been assuming that the X11 viewer was faster on Mac in the aggregate because it was faster on Linux and because the smaller 2D datasets I happened to be using for quick & dirty benchmarks were faster with X11 than with Java on Mac. However, I hadn't actually done a full benchmarking shootout on that platform until now. I just did the full comparison of all 20 "canonical" 2D and 3D datasets, comparing the latest Java viewer code with the X11 viewer running in XQuartz 2.7.4 as well as in XQuartz 2.3.6 (the version that shipped with OS X 10.6.) This was done both on my 64-bit 2009 vintage Mac Mini as well as my 32-bit 2006 vintage Macbook, and the results were surprising. On both platforms, the decoder was slower in Java, as expected (25% slower on both platforms, vs. native.) However, the drawing was so slow in XQuartz that the Java viewer managed to pull ahead and finish about 15% faster on the Mac Mini and 27% faster on the Macbook, relative to the X11 viewer running in XQuartz 2.7.4. Relative to the older XQuartz that Apple used to ship, the Java viewer was 32% faster on the Mac Mini and 65% faster on the Macbook.
I'd be really interested to see if any other Mac users can duplicate these findings, particularly on a higher-end Mac (the Mini has a GeForce in it, but still not a Mac Pro by any means.) I'll be glad to send you my benchmark datasets and instructions on how to run them and collect the data. If these findings continue to bear out, then it would be worth considering dropping the X11 viewer from Mac altogether, so if there are any strong objections to that, I'd be interested to hear those as well. I mean, it will always be possible to build it from source. The idea is that I would just not package the X11 viewer as a binary on that platform anymore, and the Java viewer would be the documented solution for Mac. There is one major feature that the Java viewer lacks, which is keyboard grabbing support, but in fact, that feature doesn't work on Mac with the X11 viewer, either, and it's less critical on Mac, because the keystrokes that one typically needs to grab (Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Esc, Windows and Menu keys, etc.) aren't captured by the operating system. Thus, I think that, in general, it might be a perfectly reasonable thing to just ship the Java viewer. Yeah, OS X 10.7 doesn't include Java by default, but neither does it include an X server by default. DRC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ VirtualGL-Users mailing list VirtualGL-Users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/virtualgl-users
