>Psychtoolbox>PsychDemos

ProceduralGaborDemo([benchmark=0][, nonsymmetric=0])

This demo demonstrates fast drawing of Gabor patches via use procedural
texture mapping. It only works on hardware with support for the GLSL
shading language, vertex- and fragment-shaders.

Gabors are not encoded into a texture, but instead a little algorithm - a
procedural texture shader - is executed on the graphics processor (GPU).
This is very fast and efficient! All parameters of the gabor patch can be
set individually.

By default - if the optional ‘nonsymmetric’ flag is not provided or set
to zero - only symmetric circular gabors are drawn. If the flag is set to
1 then gabors with an aspect ratio ~= 1, ie., elliptical gabors, are
drawn as well. Restricting drawing to symmetric gabors allows for an
additional speedup in drawing (about 15% on a MacBookPro 2nd generation),
so this may be interesting if you are in “need for speed(TM)”.

This demo is both, a speed benchmark, and a correctness test. If executed
with the optional benchmark flag set to 2, it will execute a loop
where it repeatedly draws a gabor patch both on the GPU (new style) and
with Matlab code, then reads back and verifies the images, evaluating the
maximum error between the old Matlab method and the new GPU method. The
maximum error value and plotted error map are a means to assess if
procedural shading works correctly on your setup and if the accuracy is
sufficient for your purpose. In benchmark mode (flag set to 1), the gabor
is drawn as fast as possible, testing the maximum rate at which your
system can draw gabors.

At a default setting of benchmark==0, it just shows nicely drawn gabor.

Typical results on a MacBookPro with Radeon X1600 under OS/X 10.4.11 are:
Accuracy: Error wrt. Matlab reference code is 0.0005536900, i.e., about
1 part in 2000, equivalent to a perfect display on a gfx-system with 11 bit
DAC resolution. Note that errors scale with spatial frequency and
absolute magnitude, so real-world errors are usually smaller for typical
stimuli. This is just the error, given the settings hardcoded in this script.
Typical speed is 2800 frames per second.

The error on a Radeon HD 2400 XT is 0.0000842185, i.e., about 1 part in
11000, equivalent to perfect display on a 13 bit DAC resolution gfx
system.

The error on a Radeon HD 5870 on OS/X 10.6 is 0.0000274425 units, about 15
bits effective resolution, with a framerate of 8175 fps.

Typical result on Intel Pentium IV, running on WindowsXP with a NVidia
Geforce7800 and up-to-date drivers: Error is 0.0000146741 units, ie. one
part in 68000, therefore display would be perfect even on a display device
with 15 bit DAC’s. The framerate is about 2344 frames per second.

A Geforce 8800 on OS/X achieves about max error 0.0000207 units and
a max fps of 3029 frames per second.

Please note that results in performance and accuracy *will* vary,
depending on the model of your graphics card, gfx-driver version and
possibly operating system. For consistent results, always check before you
measure on different setups! However, the more recent the graphics card,
the faster and more accurate – the latest generation of cards is
supposed to be “just perfect” for vision research…

If you want to draw many gabors per frame, you wouldn’t do it like in this script,
but use the batch-drawing version of Screen(‘DrawTextures’, …) instead,
as demonstrated, e.g., in DrawingSpeedTest.m. That way you could submit
the specs (parameters) of all gabors in one single matrix via one single
Screen(‘DrawTextures’); call - this is more efficient and therefore extra
fast!