Well I WAS going to post a thread saying that the graphics were taking up 30% of my CPU and wondering if they couldn't be offloaded to the GPU. But it seems the devs beat me to it. I see version 4.03 of the client seems to do exactly that. so...
devs++;
The only one that still sucks up CPU power (99% of it even) is the cloud cover display. I assume this is due to the more detailed texture and higher polygon count... although it still seems like a lot of that should be able to run on the GPU. I'm not really into graphics programming so all I can say is "good job!". I love how you can spin the earth - weeeee! As I said before... simple mind, simple pleasure I guess. :)

I noticed one small bug. But I think it is actually in windows. Whenever I have the CPDN graphics up, the tooltips that come up when my mouse hovers over a program in the taskbar is slightly borked. I know XP uses hardware acceleration for some of its graphics so they are probably just butting heads on the GPU or something.

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yeah Tolu &amp; I really battered out the graphics to try and optimize things. Tolu is really the one behind all of the graphics though (I hate graphics programming, it makes my head spin more than our viz!). The original CPDN graphics were done using the COIN-3D libraries but we wanted to trim things down for BOINC as straight OpenGL is preferred, and there are licencing issues with COIN etc.

The cloud/snow view is still a CPU-hog, there's so much data in that display -- snow/sea-ice/3-levels of clouds at each grid cell, and there's 73 lat * 96 long grid cells, and doing all the OpenGL mipmaps on them for the different "spheres" or layers just seems to be a hog. It's straight OpenGL calls so I would have thought that nice OpenGL cards would chew it up fine with little CPU overhead but I guess not.

But graphics is something we'll always be tweaking from release to release, I know right now there's still an "overflow" error on the Sahara desert, or somewhere similarly really hot like the Middle East India, i.e. if it's summertime you can see white grid cells as the temperatures get too hot for the top of our color scale!

&gt; It's straight OpenGL calls so I
&gt; would have thought that nice OpenGL cards would chew it up fine with little
&gt; CPU overhead but I guess not.

Well not on my geforce 4 anyway. As I said, the others work great though so don't spend too much time on it :)

&gt; But graphics is something we'll always be tweaking from release to release...

Well if you are making a list here is something I just thought of: You could make the world rotate up &amp; down via the scroll wheel. That way it could continue spinning while you roate it up &amp; down. Definitely low priority but thought I would write it down before I forget it :)
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