"Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself."
- Mark Twain

Benchmarking mode
Thursday, June 5, 2003 | Permalink

I have added some benchmarking tools into my framework. All demos compiled with it from now on will have built-in benchmarking support. Additional information here.

As of the time of this writing only the VolumetricLightingII demo has been updated with benchmark support. I will update more demos later on. If there's any particular demo you'd love to have benchmarking support in, just post a comment on this news item.

Why am I doing this? Two reasons. The first is that there has been a lot of talk about cheating in drivers lately. The sheer amount of demos I keep outputting here would make it unfeasible to cheat through shader replacement. Given that anyone can record their own flyby paths it will be impossible to use tricks like static clip planes, selectively omit framebuffer clears or anything of that kind.
The other reason is of course that it will actually provide us with some interesting performance characteristics data for the latest and greatest features on our cards. Another tool in the reviewer's toolkit.

Update:
These demos now has been updated with benchmark support:
DPS
Glow
InfiniteTerrain
Phong
PhongIllumination
VolumetricLighting
VolumetricLightingII

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CorwinB
Thursday, June 5, 2003

Nice job Humus !

"Given that anyone can record their own flyby paths it will be impossible to use tricks like static clip planes, selectively omit framebuffer clears or anything of that kind."

Thinking of any specific IHV here ? :P

Hellbinder
Friday, June 6, 2003

OT but..

Look at the last 3 pages of this thread.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=136688#post136688

What about my understanding of how Developers deal with DX9 shaders. They dont Write the shader with a specific Percision in mind right?? they write it in Dx9 HLSL and the Driver and hardware deal with the rest.

You dont write an FP16 Shader and a Fp24 shader and a FP32 shader.. You srite a Shader and the Drivers Interpret that and deal with it internally correct??

OpenGL is of course different...

I appriciate your time.


NitroGL
Friday, June 6, 2003

D3D 9's HLSL isn't in the drivers, it's in the D3DX library (completely closed source), so it's seprate from the rest of the drivers (it just compiles to PS 2.0 or whatever version you wanted).

NeoKenobi
Friday, June 6, 2003

Great initiative Humus!

Although I don't think your demos make an all-in-one benchmark utitily like 3D Mark. They just test the rendering speed of one or two extensions. Keep up the good work!

davepermen
Saturday, June 7, 2003

great job humus! lets try to get some big pages to test all the cards with your benches. just to draw some lines under the "how fast is the fx really now" question.