Digital Movie Player Benchmark

The Digital Movie Player (DMP) benchmark measures I/O and graphics performance of the dmp application. Dmp is a stereo movie playback utility that streams image files from disk into a stereo or monoscopic frame buffer. The application is both I/O and graphics intensive. Posting of imagery to the frame buffer is accomplished via rendering a single, large, bi-linearly filtered, textured mapped rectangle for each image displayed. Hence, the application has both high fill rate and texture down-load bandwidth requirements. Geometry and lighting requirements are negligable.

Data

Three file formats are profiled: sun8, bin24, and rgb24. The first, sun8, are 8-bit, indexed imagery in the Sun file format. The latter two formats are 24-bit, direct imagery (8 bits per channel). Bin24 is a generic, binary stream of pixel-interleaved, RGB tripples. The bin24 files contain no header or trailer information. The rgb24 format is SGI's, uncompressed, plane-interleaved, 24-bit, direct color raster image. The sun8 format has roughly 1/3 the I/O requirements of the 24-bit formats. The rgb24 format requires encoding before it can be passed to OGL.

The input data stream consists of a stereo, 633 frame-pair (1266 individual frames) animation.

Experiments

The benchmark is run for each of the three image formats at four different spatial resolutions: 320x240, 512x384, 640x480, and 1024x768.

Four different timers are reported: input time, data process time, display time, and run time. Input time is the time it takes to read the image file from disk. Data process time is input time plus any data formatting time (time necessary to process the imagery for display). Display time is the time it takes to process the OpenGL calls used to render the imagery. Run time is the overall execution time. The overall frame rate in frames per second is simply the run time divided by the run time.

This page maintained by John Clyne (clyne@ncar.ucar.edu)

$Date: 2000/04/17 05:58:52 $, $Revision: 1.1 $