Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance

Our New Benchmark: FrameGetter

OK, FrameGetter is not the best name for a benchmarking utility - but we are engineers and computer scientists, not marketing geniuses. Last week, we took some time to introduce everyone to our new Linux GPU benchmark. Fortunately, it was received with incredible success - both by our industry peers and our readers. You can read more of the program specifications as described by the lead developer, Wiktor Kopec, here. Just to recap, here is how the program works again:

• We install a few libraries in the lib directory that are passed data from each game.
• A shell program in the FG suite copies and modifies the game executables. All references to libGL and libSDL in the copy are replaced with our library installed in the first step.
• The modified game executable runs while happily sending data to our libraries. Our libraries look for swap while dumping the input occasionally to the /tmp directory.
• Frames per second and time are written to the screen on some games.
• The frames per second are written into /tmp/fg_logfile.
• A batch program included in the suite converts the FG screenshots into PNG files.

Obviously, there is a lot of room for improvement here. We made our program open source with the intention of allowing anyone to modify and edit the program to suit to their liking. Some of the additions that we are working on include dumping the screenshots in a readable bitmap format and binding keys to start/stop frame capture. Be warned that capturing a program with the FG modified executable on a 1280x1024 resolution consumes approximately 30GB/hour. Converting to PNG during capture consumes too much CPU usage, so we have not done that yet.

Here, you can download version 0.1.0 of the AnandTech FrameGetter source and executables. Please read the documentation very carefully. FrameGetter uses a BSD style license.

• anandtech-framegetter-0.1.0-src.tgz
• README

Even though FrameGetter is geared toward GPU benchmarking, it can provide excellent information for CPU benchmarking as well. Using the same video card, but different CPU configurations, has a lot of outcome on the frame rate. Different branching and prediction show different results from card to card - we will be using this in some upcoming Linux CPU tests.