Introduction

This chapter explains how to determine what is limiting the performance of your Open Inventor application, and provides suggestions on how to improve its performance.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

Benchmarking Tips: Describes a process for effectively investigating and improving performance. Discovering where an application is spending its time is not a matter of random trial and error.

Optimizing Rendering: Provides for each step in the rendering process:

• Information about that step.
• A method for determining how much time your application is spending in that step.
• Techniques for reducing that time. Optimizing Everything Else: Suggests ways of structuring your scene and application for maximum performance when doing tasks other than rendering (for example, picking or modifying the scene).

For more information on Open Inventor programming in general and on specific nodes, see * Open Inventor Mentor Core*.

This bulk of this chapter was written by SGI and originally appeared in the*Open Inventor 2.1 Porting and Performance Tips* document published in
1996.