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 Introduction 
 
Current Results 
 
Version 2.0 - 2.1 Results 
 
Version 1.x Results 
 
Submit Results 
 

  This project is intended to provide an indication of the relative performance of various hardware and software platforms when used to run Art Of Illusion (AoI). Because it is written in the Java programming language, it's possible to run AoI on a wide variety of computers. Our goal here is to gather and summarize information about the performance of AoI on as many different computer configurations as possible. You can help by going to the Submit Results section and following the instructions for running the tests on your computers.

These AoI benchmarks pages are organized into 5 areas, each of which is accessed by selecting its "tab" near the top of the page. You're currently at the Introduction tab. The Current Results tab summarizes the data collected so far for current versions of AoI. The next 2 tabs provide access to archival data collected for previous versions of AoI. Please note that we no longer accept submissions for these older versions of the software. The Submit Results tab contains instructions explaining how to run the tests and submit the results for inclusion in our database.

In providing this information, it is not our intention to assert the superiority of one platform over another. The speed with which a given system can render AoI scenes should probably not be the sole criteria used in selecting a platform. The suitability of a given computer for a given user depends upon a large number of factors. Also, bragging rights are a fleeting thing. There's always a faster computer coming, and no computer is ever really fast enough.

Links
Here are some links to other projects that may be of interest:

  • The POVBench project
  • The Linpack benchmark for Java
  • The CaffeineMark benchmark for Java
  • other Java benchmarking resources

    Status

    May 1, 2008
    Art of Illusion 2.6 is now available. This is the first release to require the Java 5 (1.5) runtime. This change should improve overall performance in AoI, including an improvement in rendering speed.
    August 18, 2007
    Art of Illusion 2.5 is now available. There are changes to the raster renderer, and to some of the preprocessing that happens prior to rendering.
    Dec 11, 2006
    Art of Illusion 2.4 was released on the 8th, and Java 6.0 was released 3 days later. The new JVM features "auto-tuning" that promises to make performance tuning via the command line parameters unnecessary. This combination seems to provide a nice performance boost over AoI 2.3 and Java 5.
    May 20, 2006
    Art of Illusion 2.3 has been released. There are some changes to the renderers, but we don't expect to see any significant differences in the benchmark results...
    November 6, 2005
    Art of Illusion 2.2 is out! This version adds multi-threading capabilities to the renderers, which should provide a performance improvement for dual core and hyper-threading processors, as well as for multi-processor machines. Because of this change, we're starting a new round of benchmarks.
    March 27, 2005
    The telefish.net server that hosts the AoI benchmarks was broken into last night (Happy Easter). This was no great feat of cracking; some misguided brats just took advantage of administrative negligence on my part. Unfortunately, the benchmark results for version 2.0 that had been collected up to that point were lost, so please resubmit your results if you don't see them on the results page. Sorry for the inconvenience!
    March 7, 2005
    Version 2.0 of Art of Illusion was released today and it looks like it brings another big performance boost vs 1.8! So that we can be sure we're comparing "apples to apples", we are archiving the results for 1.x versions of AoI, and are starting afresh with the 2.x versions.
    September 30, 2004
    Sun has released a new version of Java, now called Java 5.0. Will we see an improvement in AoI performance? Setting of the -server flag is now somewhat automated, though it can still be overridden on most systems. See this article.
    July 26, 2004
    AoI version 1.8 has arrived! Place your bets!
    June 16, 2004
    The benchmark results confirm that using the -server switch with the Sun JVM yields a noticeable performance improvement, but at a cost. See this interesting article, and also this one.
    March 18, 2004
    Version 1.7 of AoI is out, and it appears to provide a very large performance improvement! More testing is needed, but improvements of between 10% and 20% are being recorded for some systems.
    By the way, we'd love to see some results for 64 bit processors!
    June 30, 2003
    The AoI benchmarks pages are now available to the public. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your (rendering) engines!
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