Finding The Perfect PC Components For Your Favorite Game Or Workload

With the latest code push today on OpenBenchmarking.org has been one of the most sought after features of making it easier to find the best graphics card for your favorite game, the optimal processor for your computational tasks, and other workloads measured via our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software.

The OpenBenchmarking.org development continues on its new server infrastructure and code base with being in public beta since the end of January. Some more features are still landing in preparation for its stable tagging alongside Phoronix Test Suite 6.2 later this month.

In addition to the rewritten OpenBenchmarking.org search capabilities, another new addition is the "showdown" page available for each test profile. When navigating to a test profile page (e.g. Xonotic), there is now a "Looking For The Best Performance?" area with link to the "showdown" page.

When going to the showdown page for a test profile, it attempts to dynamically generate a performance comparison of all the public test results available for a given test profile. If looking at say a game benchmark or anything graphics related, it will show averaged data for all of the unique (in this case, graphics card) combinations where enough data has been built up. Here is a look at how graphics cards compare for Xonotic. It shows all of the graphics cards that are backed by at least 10 unique results, averages their result, shows the deviation in result, and sorts the data then by performance, and limits it to the past three years of data. For tests like graphics tests where there may be choice of resolution or various other settings, it will show multiple graphs starting with the most common combinations of the test settings.

There is also a basic search bar on that page if wanting to narrow down the results, e.g. the Xonotic results with Mesa. That searching though is quite basic and there are areas for improvement (e.g. if searching "AMD" do you mean you want any GPU shown where tested with an AMD CPU or do you just want to see all AMD GPUs). But that search should work fine for basic revising of the data set. In that Xonotic data set being used in this article as an example, it's looking at more than 11,000 results!

With the graphs being in SVG, you can simply use your browser's built-in find/search capabilities if looking for a particular item on the graph. I'm also toying with other ideas for further dicing this massive pool of performance data.

This showdown works for any test profile out there backed by enough data, such as if wanting to find:
The most tested GPUs with Counter-Strike: GO
The fastest GPUs as measured by GPUTest or even OpenArena (still experimenting how to show driver differences on these pages)
The fastest CPUs for compiling the Linux kernel
The fastest hardware for a PostgreSQL server
The fastest disks for a Linux system
The fastest CPU for an Apache server
Or anything else out of the hundreds of test profiles or whatever other test profile you make, upload to OpenBenchmarking.org, and get other people to run.

Once again, it's all computed dynamically based upon the test's meta-data and other automatically parsed information. Within the OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite code-bases, there continues to be nothing test-specific at all but is all a modular, extensible architecture driven by test profiles and test suites. OpenBenchmarking.org has more than four million test reports!

Anyhow, poke around the new OpenBenchmarking.org and give it a try. Any feedback or suggestions on this new feature or anything else on OpenBenchmarking.org is certainly welcome. I hope to get it all tidied up for a possible PTS 6.2-Gamvik launch next week. Some more features -- including the restored work on realtime pricing -- is coming shortly.