README


README file for fill rate demo
Author: Rob Moore, rmoore@sgi.com
Credit: much of this code is from 'blockmonkey' by Kevin Luster

The point behind this application is to demonstrate the performance
penalty for various features. Through controller manipulation, the
user is able to toggle parameters such as antialiasing, Zbuffering and
polygon count. A status bar at the bottom of the screen indicates what
percent of a frame time the RCP processing overhead is for the
generated display list.

The actual variables which are controllable are printed in the xterm
that gload was run in. The "START" button in any controller mode will 
reset all parameters to their intial default values.

Some notes to keep in mind:

The status bar at the bottom of the screen is broken up into units of
1/60th of a second for NTSC (1/50th of a second for PAL). The status
bar self-scales itself to cover a larger range of processing time. use
"gload -a -s" to turn this feature off.

The status bar measures *ONLY* the time that it takes for the rdp to
process the display list, it does not include any of the
setup time in the R4300/rsp to construct the display list. Thus the frame
update rate on the screen probably will not correspond to the frame
compute time displayed by the status bar.

The triangles are sorted in Z, and the user can control whether triangles
are displayed from front->back or back->front.  This allows measuring the
effect of Z write masking.

The number of triangles, aspect ratio, and scale of the triangles are all
controllable.  The triangles are not allowed to grow larger than the screen
in order to eliminate extra triangles caused by clipping.  

Command line flags:

-a => flag that aligns triangle to 32B boundary in DRAM, usually used
	  with the -x flag to see the effect of translating the triangles
	  across the 32B boundaries.

-b => blank video, disable DRAM dma for video (VI).
	  
-c => disble background clear.

-d => disable shaded triangle.  This is useful when processing a large
	  number of triangles since there are 8 fewer 64-bit words per primitive
	  to store.

-g => dump GBI display list

-p => disable statistics print

-r => dump RDP display list

-s => disable self-scale of timer display