[Mesa3d-dev] NULL renderer for Mesa?

[Kendall B. <Ken...@sc...>]

Hi Guys,

We are doing some performance profiling of our Mesa->Direct3D 
drivers, and are getting absolutely dismal performance from the 
display list components in Mesa. On not so good hardware with Quake3 
engines we can get to about 80% of the speed of an ICD driver. 
However when we run ProCDRS to benchmark CAD performance, the ICD 
drivers are on the order of 10x-50x faster! Some quick profiling has 
shown that the bottlenecks appear to be in the display list code.

So, to determine just how much of a bottleneck the generic Mesa code 
is, we would like to code up a NULL renderer for Mesa and try running 
ProCDRS on that. Before I waste time trying to do this, I was 
wondering if anyone else has already done something similar? 
Basically it would be a Mesa driver that would allow me to do 
absolutely nothing when asked to render pixels, and possibly another 
level to actually do nothing and return right when vertices are about 
to be passed down the geometry and clipping pipelines. That way we 
can profile how much of overhead is in the display list and other 
generic pieces of code and more important see which hot areas need 
some work.

Thanks!

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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