Hello, I am new to the Macintosh environment and was wondering if someone could help me here. I have written a java application (stand-alone) on a Windows platform. The application is computation intensive and uses Java3D APIs to render 3D objects. Also, the application uses JSci APIs to render 2D graphs and has a number of other features, which use extremely large arrays. The application is built using Swing APIs whereever possible. Now, when I run the application (jar) on a Windows platform (XP), it runs fine as expected. However, when I run the same application on Mac OS X (10.3.5), it runs extremely slow, takes ages to render 3D objects or to do anything as a matter a fact. In summary, the application runs much much faster on Windows (Intel P4 - 1.4 GHz, 768MB RAM) as compared to running it on a Dual 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 with 1GB RAM. This does not make sense to me. Any insight/help would be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Ok... chances are your problem is GPU bound in the sense that the bottlenecks are in your display logic.

Check the state of Java3D's support for Mac hardware accelerated 3d graphics...

If this is causing you grief... it might be better to use JOGL - a java to openGL binding... ogl is a little more "primative" thatn Java3D, but because it is a bindings layer... you can be guaranteed that it's trying ot use hardware acceleration. Java3D tries to do some magic... whereby it will use acceleration IF IT detects there is a suitable platform. Otherwise, it will just do it in software, and that's where the slowdowns start. Generic microprocessors (x86 hardware) just doesn't cut it for realtime 3d graphics... hence the need for GPUs.

Java can be made to run pretty fast... the hotspot optimising jvms really do a pretty good job to cache machine generated instructions rather than interpret them. It will never be as fast as native C/C++ but the productivity gains are there... so if saeenali is doing something scientific or other where you're looking at algorithms and how they work rather than optimising for a specific game, Java would make sense.

One other thing... Swing is a very slow GUI platform. Consider using jogl to render out your graphs and what not. Alternatively, consider the framework from eclipse.