Going Beyond Just Measuring Frame Rates

The automated regression tracking support that was introduced in Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 that combined the power of pts-core with a module that ran atop the git-bisect command to autonomously traverse a Git repository and run a set of tests on that code in order to find a targeted performance regression, can even be applied here! Now for example, if a shader bug or some other problem is introduced into say the Mesa Git tree that causes a visual regression, that can be picked up by the Phoronix Test Suite and then automatically found using the bisect module, etc. Analytical options are already being built into the Phoronix Test Suite to provide the quantitative needs in such a scenario, with being able to compute the pixel differences between multiple images, etc. There are many other possibilities that come out of this work too. Of course, this works not only on Linux, but also with supported Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and *BSD systems as well (and Windows once that is supported).

At the end of the day there is now a way for end-users to quickly and easily compare the image quality (with other abstract result types coming too) of their hardware/software with others. For developers the Phoronix Test Suite is now even more powerful in being able to carry out such comparisons in its usual autonomy while leveraging all other Phoronix Test Suite features such as the automated regression tracking and more. Plenty of analytical options for image comparisons are on the way too for Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik", which will be released in February.

Other exciting features for Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 continue to be worked on and will be exposed in the near future as we continue to work towards creating the best, most innovative benchmarking and automated testing platform. As always, the Phoronix Test Suite can be downloaded at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com or (older versions) through your distribution's package repository.

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