Apple just recently released their MacBook Pro with the new Intel Core Duo Chip.  If you don’t already know, this machine is the first Macintosh notebook built upon the new Intel Core Duo Chip and it actually has two processors built into a single chip — making it the fastest transportable Mac in history.   We here at CEI wanted to test out the hype for ourselves.  Here is a look at the latest performance test numbers using EnSight:

EnSight benchmarks for MacBook Pro Windows and OSX as well as PowerBook G4 OSX 

The columns labeled ‘MacBook Pro Win32’ and ‘MacBook Pro OS X’ are running the same version of EnSight on the same exact hardware (MacBook Pro) under Windows XP and Mac OSX, respectively. Notice that in tests 1, 2 and 3 the MacBook Pro running OS X is faster and for 4 and 5, the MacBook Pro running Windows XP is faster. Whether running Windows XP or OS X, the MacBook Pro is faster than the PowerBook G4, in some cases 5x or more faster. This points to differences that are beyond the hardware level like compiler, graphics driver, operating system, etc. These differences will be explained in more detail below.

Performance Testing
CEI is again at the front of the pack in our ability to test and use new capabilities proving that we remain at the cutting-edge.  If you use EnSight you know that CEI is very concerned with making sure our products work on as many platforms that are available.  Customers often ask us what hardware they should consider purchasing, or which hardware is faster than another. The answer is difficult to say the least.  EnSight performance testing was started several years ago in response to this question and a great number of performance benchmarks have been completed over that time. 

CEI does not endorse or recommend any hardware vendor above another. As an independent software company we supply software to run across multiple hardware platforms. We can, however, report to you some benchmark numbers on how well the graphics hardware of various workstations perform as you can see in the chart above.

How the tests work
CEI performs five tests that stress the hardware graphics system as well as the CPU and memory systems.  All five tests operate on a geometry containing three parts containing a total of 6,324 quads and 128,534 triangles. These parts are then duplicated for a total of six instances. Thus the total number of polygons in the test is 37,944 quads and 771,204 triangles. All tests are run using a display area measuring 600x500 pixels. All polygons are randomly oriented (i.e., no "stripping" is done).

The first test is a line drawing test that rotates the scene 360 degrees in 12-degree increments for 30 refreshes of the screen. The total number of lines drawn during the test is (37,944*4 + 771,204*3)*30 = 73,961,640 lines. Each part has a single color.

The second test is a shaded test that rotates the scene 360 degrees in 12-degree increments for 30 refreshes of the screen. The total number of polygons drawn during the test is 24,274,440. Each part has a single color.

The third test is a repeat of the second test, but here the parts are colored on a per vertex basis.

The fourth test is a repeat of the third test, except it is run in immediate mode (as opposed to display list mode for the previous tests). EnSight uses immediate mode for flipbook animations, hidden line display, and all detached (VR) displays.

The fifth test is a repeat of the fourth test, but here the two large isosurface parts are transparent and the rotation uses 72 degree increments for a total of 5 refreshes. This test stresses not only the graphics subsystem, but the CPU/memory as well since the polygons have to be sorted for each refresh of the screen.

A composite score can be computed for each platform by using the frame rate and weighing the importance of each test as follows (the list is in performance order):

So the composite score, C, using test1 (T1) through test 5 (T5) is found as follows:

C = 0.25*(30.0/T1) + 0.2*(30/T2) + 0.2*(30/T3) + 0.2*(30/T4) + 0.15*(5/T5)

It is important to note that these tests only measure the time required to complete the animations. Image quality is more subjective and may be better on some systems than others. In particular, on some systems multi-sampling is enabled by default (either by EnSight or through the graphics driver). The resulting image quality is much better, but there can be a cost in performance.

Additional Links
For information on how EnSight runs on different types of hardware, click here.

If you want to submit performance results on a system not shown here, please send your results and system information to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .