HP P Class 450/500/550/600/650/700/750 Supplementary Manual page 8

Comparing the VISUALIZE fx4+ to the VISUALIZE fx4
The following features or improvements have been added to the Visualize FX+ products to significantly enhance
performance, and quality, as compared with the Visualize FX4.
AGP DMA Engine. This increases a driver's ability to drive the rest of the hardware to its full capacity.
Immediate mode graphics (higher performance and better parallelism with applications)
Display list performance for primitives with less than 6 elements (e.g., less than 6 triangles per triangle strip)
Faster pixel operations (e.g., glDrawPixels)
Faster texture download to hardware (for the initial download, or applications that need more textures than fit
in on-board texture memory)
Support for DirectDraw hardware acceleration
Asynchronous cursor for better interactivity (e.g., with Unigraphics)
Faster 2d operations through driver improvements.
To see the improvement in immediate mode performance, Figure 7 compares the older fx4 technology to the fx+
series. The performance of the fx4 is always bracketed between fx4+ and the fx2+, but generally closer to the fx2+
for single processor systems.
4000000
3500000
3000000
2500000
2000000
1500000
1000000
500000
0
0
The display list performance difference is not as dramatic. The fx4 is comparable to the fx4+ for triangle strips with 7
or more triangles per triangles strip, but is significantly less than the fx4+ for 6 or less triangles in a triangle strip (see
Figure 8). This is significant because many applications generate triangle strips with 6 or less triangles per strip.
03/12/99
Figure 7. Immediate Mode Performance
1 2 3
Triangles per Triangle Strip (25 pixel triangles)
4 5 6
fx6+
fx4+
fx4
fx2+
HP 7