3D Graphics Performance Comparison – Part 4 (KeyCreator)

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In this part I tweak the default graphics settings of KeyCreator and see how that affects it performance. John McCullough of Kubotek USA recommended that I set up my KeyCreator graphics settings as follows.

These differ from the default graphic settings. I changed the driver type from Hardware OpenGL to Direct3D, switched display lists from segment to geometry and disabled all quick move options. These settings yield quite a good display quality.

Click image for larger view

Here is a new video.

This is the video from the original comparison using the default settings.

Although it may not be quite evident in the videos, I noticed an improvement. There were hardly any frames dropped. I think I am going to put KeyCreator in the same category as SpaceClaim.

You may have noticed something else different in the two videos. The new one has parts colored differently, whereas the old one has everything in green. KeyCreator comes with a macro which can automatically color parts in different colors, just like SpaceClaim does. To use it go to click Play Macro/KXL from the Add-ins menu and select Colorize.kxl. Select the parts that you wish to color and KeyCreator will do the rest. I didn’t know about this.

According to John, as far as graphics performance is concerned, in Windows XP OpenGL has an advantage in most cases. Whereas in Windows 7, Direct3D is better. He went on to say, “Our defaults are designed for practical general mechanical viewing at maximum frame rate. If users want to get fancy we’ve got backgrounds, environment maps, reflection planes, Z plane shadows, and self-shadowing, plus the ability to add lights. The trouble with defaulting those options on is that many users don’t have hardware that will handle those options well. We leave silhouette edges off by default because turning silhouette edges on will decrease frame rates significantly on a complex model like this. In this case when I turned on silhouettes (View>Render>Silhouette) I got 8.4 fps in Hardware OpenGL and 5.5 in Direct3D. Rates below 10 are noticeably clumsy.”

I tried turning on silhouettes and found that to be true.

Part 5 >>