GLScry: An OpenGL Benchmarking Framework
Characterizing the performance of graphics hardware is much harder than that of standard processors. They are pretty starightforward: one command in, some processing, one result out. They're not quite as simple anymore, with caches, out-of-order execution, speculative branching etc., but they still have relatively short pipelines in the order of 10-20 stages. Graphics hardware, on the other hand, is much more complex. Pipelines with hundreds of stages and buffers of different sizes at various interconnects are commonplace. In addition to this, manufacturers are much less forthcoming with details about their internal pipelines due to competitive pressure in the market. There is very little information about the best way of doing things, and the relative performance of different ways of achieving the same result (which are usually are quite a lot). Therefore every developer needs to treat the graphics hardware as a big black box that needs exploring by many little benchmarking programs. GLScry is a framework to simplify writing of these bechmarking programs.
- Started:
- 2004-04-01
- Ended:
- 2005-08-01
- Homepage:
- http://aegisknight.org/glscry
- Past Students:
- Alex Allen, Chad Austin
- Funded By:
- Carver Research Grant
