Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation

SPECopc previews SPECviewperf 10
at annual SIGGRAPH press conference

BOSTON, Mass., August 3, 2006 – SPEC/GPC’s OpenGL Performance Characterization (SPECopc) project group announced plans for SPECviewperf 10 during a press conference yesterday at the SIGGRAPH 2006 trade show in Boston. SPECviewperf 10 – the next version of performance evaluation software for systems running popular CAD/CAM, digital content creation, and visualization applications – is anticipated for release in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The SPECopc group expects that SPECviewperf 10 will include the following new features and upgrades:

• New Maya and 3ds Max viewsets based on traces of the SPECapc application benchmarks, with bigger models, greater complexity and better textures.
• An updated CATIA viewset based on CATIA V5 R16 with a more realistic data stream and the ability to mix immediate and vertex array modes.
• Ability to measure multisampling performance for high-quality imaging.
• Ability to measure multiscreen performance.

All viewsets in SPECviewperf 10 will be developed using Mesh4, SPECopc’s file format for capturing OpenGL graphics calls as an application does, but without the overhead of an application. This enables the SPECopc group to accurately portray gigabytes of application data in viewset files typically less than 200 MB.

“As always, our goal is to characterize graphics performance within SPECviewperf so that it correlates as much as possible to what is experienced by users in the real world,” says Ian Williams, SPECopc chair. “We do this within a concise package that can be run in less than an hour on most workstations.”

About SPECviewperf

SPECviewperf has become a worldwide standard for users assessing graphics performance for new purchases and upgrades, graphics card vendors testing products under development, OEMs evaluating graphics components, and consultants and publication editors reviewing new graphics systems. The benchmark measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL application programming interface. SPECviewperf test files, called viewsets, represent a popular mix of graphics rendering and manipulation found in actual applications. Current viewsets represent graphics functionality in 3ds Max, CATIA, EnSight, Lightscape, Maya, Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, UGS NX 3, and UGS Teamcenter Visualization Mockup.

About SPECopc

SPECopc is a project group of the Graphics Performance Characterization (GPC) Group, which is part of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC). SPEC is a non-profit corporation formed to establish, maintain and endorse a standardized set of relevant benchmarks that can be applied to the newest generation of high-performance computers. SPEC’s membership includes computer hardware and software vendors, and leading universities and research facilities worldwide. For more information, visit: www.spec.org.

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