Tool for measuring FPS in games

[dammarin]

Getting started with BuGLE, setting it up to log framerates to a file, and then processing it with awk or something similar to get get the average framerate isn't that hard, and you can probably get all the help you need here in the forum.

Not sure if it fits with what you're trying to accomplish though?

BuGLe looks like a good tool for Linux. I'd like to have something like this for OS X too, though. I can't either test BuGLe or Xcode until this evening, however :-(

What I'm trying to do is twofold:

First, since gaming just took off on Mac and is about to take of on Linux with the release of Steam, I believe people will want to read benchmarks of various games on these systems, so tools to do it will be useful. I want to do such benchmarks.

Second, since nothing like this exists on either platform, this could be made into an end-user product, since people will probably want to do the benchmarks themselves.

Which is why I'm thinking about contracting someone to do it, since I can't program for the life of me.

[curaga]

Does every benchmark-worthy game already not have a FPS counter?

[Svartalf]

Cool! Another interesting tool I never heard about

dammarin, it looks like Xcode provides some sort of OpenGL profiler on OSX:
http://developer.apple.com/graphicsi...ler_image.html

Unfortunately, this would require a re-write to be able to do things on Linux as it's a MacOS item. (Doesn't mean it won't happen- it's just not there right now... )

[whizse]

Yeah, any specific game you're thinking of, or why not use PTS in the first place?

A user friendly tool similar to Fraps would be nice to have, but sponsoring the development yourself might be expensive.

[Svartalf]

Does every benchmark-worthy game already not have a FPS counter?

Actually, no, they don't. (From personal and professional experience, you're going to find that only things like Quake, etc. have that sort of beastie and they've been relying on things like Fraps, etc. to get actual FPS counts...)

[dammarin]

Yeah, any specific game you're thinking of, or why not use PTS in the first place?

A user friendly tool similar to Fraps would be nice to have, but sponsoring the development yourself might be expensive.

Any games I can get my hands on. Anything new coming out for Linux, all the blockbuster Mac games as well (Dragon Age, Riddick, etc).

That's the thing. I don't know how expensive it would be, so I can't make a call. I know that I need it and I'm looking for a way to obtain it. I can't write it myself, so I'm considering paying for it.

[dammarin]

The OpenGL Profiler on OS X is not bad! It's not precisely what I'm looking for, but it does indeed show the framerate of an application it attaches to.

I need to do more tests, but it should be OK for very rough performance estimates. "Rough" because it seems to update the FPS relatively rarely as it doesn't react to pretty dramatic but short framerate dips and it's necessary to look at the display at all times to record the framerates. I'm sure a programmer would be able to hook into something there to extract the data, though :-)

Anyway, something like this but more suited to benchmarking would be ideal: hooking up to an application, measuring fps at short intervals (1/5 sec?) and dumping the result to a file in a format easily importable to OpenOffice's Calc. Benchmarking heaven :-D

[whizse]

A little bit more geeky than the profiler on OS X I imagine, but it does the job:

$ BUGLE_CHAIN=showfps LD_PRELOAD=/home/sa/Temp/bugle/lib/libbugle.so glxgears

$ cat bugle.log 
[INFO] logstats.frames per second: 36.2 fps
[INFO] logstats.frames per second: 60.1 fps
[INFO] logstats.frames per second: 60.0 fps
[INFO] logstats.frames per second: 59.9 fps
[...]

$ awk '{ s += $5 } END { print "average framerate: ", s/NR }' bugle.log
average framerate:  59.7136

(Of course you need to build bugle first, and make a few small edits to ~/.bugle/filters before it logs to a file.)

[Svartalf]

(Of course you need to build bugle first, and make a few small edits to ~/.bugle/filters before it logs to a file.)

Well, there WAS a reason I mentioned it, but warned there was a bit of "assembly required" involved with it's use.

[whizse]

Yup, too bad it hasn't been packaged by more distros.