According to the organization, SPECviewperf v9 includes two new viewsets, a restructured viewset and code changes that bring the testing environment much closer to the realities experienced by application users. New viewsets in SPECviewperf v9 are based on traces of UGS Teamcenter Visualization Mockup, a conceptual design application, and UGS NX 3, a CAD/CAM application. Both new viewsets reportedly use very large and complex models -- up to 11 million vertices in the Teamcenter Visualization Mockup viewset and 30 million vertices in the NX 3 viewset.
The company reports that a significant change in SPECviewperf v9 is the use of glDrawElements instead of glArrayElement within the restructured Maya viewset. With the change, SPECviewperf v9 follows the same OpenGL command stream as Maya v6.5, handling graphics data in the same way as the actual application.
"This new version represents tremendous strides in accommodating complex data sets and making SPECviewperf results more closely represent real-world performance," says Ian Williams, SPECopc chair. "This is still a synthetic benchmark, but one with a distinctive ability to accurately capture and codify the performance of graphics operations within popular applications."