Can anyone advise on tests to run for the Blender Game Engine?

[Mr_Alien_Overlord]

I'm working on a game with it at them moment, but would like to get some kind of estimate of what kind of specs my game would crawl / work / be fun / fly with.

I know I could make the blend public and ask, but I'd really like to be able to see results from a wide range of machines without spoiling surprises early.

I was (/am?) really hoping we'd see Yo Frankie become a test suite. Even just somethng that gave out the numbers from Blender's own performance stats (Framerate, %CPU load - Rasterizer / Logic / Physics). Failing that I'm guessing that some combo of the PTS tests would help approximate, but I'm a bit lost as to which ones...

Thanks all! PTS is looking like a great tool. With Ubuntu / Arch inclusion and a Gui on it's way, I have a feeling we're seeing a real leader of the pack rising.

[Michael]

Hi Mr_Alien_Overlord,

Right now there are no Blender-based tests in the Phoronix Test Suite for a simple reason actually. At least last time I checked, in order to use the benchmark mode of Blender you must launch Blender and then hit some key or some menu item, but at least as of the last time I checked, there was no argument like blender -benchmark some-file.blend where it would then run the benchmark and print the result to the standard output and then exit.

If you can find such an option or get the Blender developers to implement such an option, I would be more than happy to write the test profile and get the rest of it setup.

Michael

[Mr_Alien_Overlord]

Looks like the anser may be in this post here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=149326

[Mr_Alien_Overlord]

Hi Michael,

There seems to be interest, but it would be useful to know what kind of output works best for you. Would some kind of file like a comma delimited texfile be the way to go, or is it better printed straight to the console, and if so in what format?

The current thinking is to provide something in the format of:
blenderplayer -b duration = 120 step = 1 output = stats.data my_benchmark.blend

step being how often stats are polled and stats.data being a file in a format of your choice.

How does this sound?

MAO

[Michael]

Hi Michael,

There seems to be interest, but it would be useful to know what kind of output works best for you. Would some kind of file like a comma delimited texfile be the way to go, or is it better printed straight to the console, and if so in what format?

The current thinking is to provide something in the format of:
blenderplayer -b duration = 120 step = 1 output = stats.data my_benchmark.blend

step being how often stats are polled and stats.data being a file in a format of your choice.

How does this sound?

MAO

The Phoronix Test Suite can handle parsing pretty much anything whether it's printed to the screen or dumped to a text file, as long as it's outputted in some remotely logical way. It can be comma delimited, tab delimited, space delimited, I don't care nor does PTS, it can be setup to parse anything as long as it's outputted in some way that's at least partially understandable.

In that thread you mentioned this for one of the tests:

############################################
Nexuiz:
Resolution: 800 x 600 - HDR: No - Sound: Off


Average: 45.12 Frames Per Second
############################################

That's the format the Phoronix Test Suite actually generates after parsing a test, but isn't the way that it's sent to PTS.

So would the stats then be dumped to that file on like a new line every time it's polled? That's fine. Then once the test is done and it (automatically) exits, if it is able to print the average for everything, that would be great. Otherwise I can just parse all of the polling results in PTS and calculate the averages there.

[Michael]

The current thinking is to provide something in the format of:
blenderplayer -b duration = 120 step = 1 output = stats.data my_benchmark.blend

and would step be the number of times its polled before exiting? If so great, otherwise such an option would also be nice.

[Michael]

Mr_Alien_Overlord, have you made any progress with getting the needed bits into Blender?

[stiiixy]

*bump*

Am I allowed to bump on this site?

*bump*

[Michael]

Waiting on hearing from the Blender developers... Mr_Alien_Overlord, have you heard anything yet?

[stiiixy]

According to this linkus http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=149326 one of the dev's was going to include a basic function in the 2.5 release (last post)