[Gllug] Glxgears

[John Hearns]

On 5 February 2011 00:12, Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> wrote:
> On 4 Feb 2011, Daniel P. Berrange spake thusly:
>
>> The FPS glxgears reports is a measure of how fast the driver
>> sends frames to the screen. The fact that you see 59 FPS is
>> simply an indication that the driver is artifically limiting
>> itself to match monitor's vertical refresh rate. This is good
>> for normal usage because it avoids visual tearing during screen
>> updates, but it makes glxgears useless as a benchmark tool
>
> glxgears is useless as a benchmark tool anyway. The stuff it's
> benchmarking just isn't what 3D apps do.

Wot Nix said.

I do a lot of work with 3D graphics applications on Linux, and am
frequently asked by my users about performance - really more the 'my
workstation is running slow' type questions rather than out-and-out
performance.

 I frequently reach for GLXgears as a quick test just to see that the
display is capable of some sort of performance. I work with PCOIP for
remote graphics   www.teradici.com
so need to check that the link is OK and the display is correctly set up
(By the way, the UK manager for this company is very happy to give a GLLUG talk)

I also have experimented with virtualgl displaying on X servers on
Windows machines - again I use GLXgears as a quick test to see if it
spins fast enough!

Anyway, to the meat of my reply. I was asked for graphics performance
benchmarks when we were selecting Nvidia graphics cards last year.
Linux benchmarks are thin on the ground, and the two below are
invaluable. Free download etc.
I was using the SPEC benchmark on Thursday - again debugging Teradici
- someone asked me to set up a demo in a meeting room, and the network
performance was not stellar.

So: Spec Viewperf 11  http://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.static/vp11info.html
Download, unpack, descend to the directory where viewperf-gui is and run it.
Watch the pretty cars and submarines rotating to your hearts content.
You can fill in the details of your system and get a nicely formatted report.


Unigine Sanctuary/Tropics/Heaven
http://unigine.com/products/sanctuary/
Download, run and hit the button for benchmark mode - F11 if I remember.

Have fun.
--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug