SPEC Finally Updates SPECViewPerf For Linux With SPECViewPerf 2020 v3.0

SPEC today finally published an updated Linux-native build of their SPECViewPerf industry graphics benchmark for professional applications.

While SPECViewPerf 2020 has been available for Windows, only today is their first Linux build being made available to succeed SPECViewPerf 13.0 for Linux from 2019 where they were also late in introducing a Linux version of their graphics benchmark after the Windows release.

In any event, to much excitement the SPECViewPerf 2020 v3.0 Linux Edition is now available to stress the Linux graphics stack with traces from Maya, Catia, Creo, NX, and SolidWorks.

SPEC lists the SPECViewPerf 2020 v3.0 Linux requirements as Ubuntu 20.04, 16GB+ of RAM, 80GB of disk space, OpenGL 4.5, and a GPU with at least 2GB of video memory. It will be very interesting to see the AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics performance on Linux with SPECViewPerf 2020 especially given all of the RadeonSI optimizations AMD pursued last year for benefiting their open-source OpenGL driver with these workstation applications.

Sadly, with SPECViewPerf 2020 v3.0 Linux Edition they opted for distributing it as a Debian package rather than a generic Tar archive as in past releases. While one can extract the Debian archive to run elsewhere, that also comes up short as now the actual traces/assets are downloaded via a new "Manage Viewsets" utility run at install-time. This utility allows the user to select which traces/assets they would like to download and install for SPECViewPerf. This may work out fine for individual users and those only caring about a subset, but unfortunate there isn't the option of a generic archive anymore and with the whole collection of assets that make for much easier testing in multi-system environments and being able to cache everything locally for testing across hardware.

More details on today's Linux release via SPEC.org.