Suldal Improvements; New OpenCL, VDPAU Benchmarks
Phoronix Test Suite 4.0-Suldal Milestone 2 was released, but first of all, not binded to this release are some new test profile uploads to OpenBenchmarking.org. Any Phoronix Test Suite 3.x user also has the ability to now run phoronix-test-suite benchmark qvdpautest luxmark to now run some new OpenCL and NVIDIA VDPAU tests.
The qVDPAUtest itself is not new but is not widely-known and is only now being introduced to the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org. With VDPAU-supported drivers -- namely the NVIDIA binary blob and to some extent the Gallium3D drivers with the VDPAU state tracker -- this is an easy test profile to measure the GPU's video decoding performance for H.264/MPEG/MPEG-4/VC-1 formats. There's long been the video-cpu-usage to judge the CPU usage during video playback with VA-API / X-Video / XvMC / VA-API formats, but now there's qVDPAUtest as a complementary way to look at a system's video playback performance (some example results).
The other exciting new test profile is for LuxMark (and the upstream LuxMark page). LuxMark is an already popular multi-platform open-source OpenCL benchmark. LuxMark has been used by various Windows-based hardware review web-sites along with NVIDIA and AMD, but only now will be gaining some traction under Linux.
I've been working with David Bucciarelli of LuxMark the past few weeks to make LuxMark more friendly towards automated testing. Rather than relying upon GUI-based controls for testing, the next LuxMark release (v2.1) will support controls via command-line switches and other improvements that make it easier to integrate with the Phoronix Test Suite or anyone wishing to not be reliant upon the GUI for the interesting (and demanding) OpenCL tests. Bucciarelli was nice enough to make a beta 1 release for the Linux version of LuxMark 2.1, so now it's possible to have it in the Phoronix Test Suite in a fully automated manner.
There's three interesting test scenes within LuxMark and it's able to test any combination of the CPU / GPU.
In terms of the work that's went into the new Phoronix Test Suite 4.0-Suldal Milestone 2 release, there is a lot of good stuff. Already for the "Suldal" cycle we've seen many improvements in milestone one, but with milestone two there's about two more weeks of changes. The end-user-facing changes mainly come down to:
- The recently talked about CPU and GPU verbose reporting improvements under Linux. (Plus the new "side view table" that's used by this new reporting.)
- Better recognition of some open-source vs. closed-source GPU comparison matching.
- Detection of some new CPU features of Intel "Ivy Bridge" processors.
- Support for detecting and reading the version of the installed Intel IOC, which is the Intel Offline Compiler, used to compile OpenCL code as part of Intel's OpenCL SDK 2012.
- Support for detecting Intel's Glamor acceleration architecture.
- Various fixes and minor improvements.
Those wishing to test out this latest Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 development preview that will be officially released in the summer of 2012, the latest version can be downloaded from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. While it's still in development, 4.0-Suldal is already what's used in all new Phoronix.com articles for Linux benchmarking. Prior to the official 4.0 release are still more Phoronix Test Suite features, extensive OpenBenchmarking.org work, and some other items that will be covered in the coming weeks.
Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 Milestone 2
29 April 2012
- pts-core: Better recognize some open-source vs. closed-source graphics card/driver combination comparisons
- pts-core: Fix potential crash in list-test-usage command
- pts-core: Support for detecting FSGSBASE and RDRAND on Intel Ivy Bridge
- pts-core: When detecting a CPU comparison, report the detailed CPU system table information
- pts-core: When detecting a GPU/OpenGL comparison, report the detailed GPU system table information
- pts-core: Fix PRESET_OPTIONS failing when specifying an option value rather than its index
- pts-core: Archive vdpauinfo when available
- phodevi: Detection support for Intel IOC (Intel Offline Compiler) OpenCL SDK
- phodevi: Support for detecting GLAMOR (Intel OpenGL-accelerated X.Org Driver) acceleration
- pts_Graph: Fix rounding issue on pts tables that are very wide
- pts_Graph: Add SideViewTable
- documentation: Add a basic text README to the root phoronix-test-suite directory
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