SPECViewPerf 10 Released For Linux

While there aren't many workstation OpenGL benchmarks available for Linux, the leading option is SPECViewPerf, which is developed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. SPECViewPerf has been around for years and is made up of various production-oriented tests from popular software programs in the real world. Among the programs these tests are based upon include 3DS Max, Maya, SolidWorks, and EnSight. The latest version of SPECViewPerf -- version 10.0 -- first shipped for Windows a year ago, but it wasn't until this morning that the Linux/UNIX code was made available.

Back in May of 2007, SPEC (the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) had released SPECViewPerf 10 for both Windows XP and Windows Vista. SPECViewPerf 10.0 added improved graphics and multi-threading support for multi-core systems. The improved graphics come in the way of support for FSAA, or full-scene anti-aliasing. In addition, this release has underlying improvements that separate the ViewPerf benchmarks from the view-sets, which allows for smaller downloads and more frequent updates of content. Now just shy of a year later, the SPECViewPerf 10.0 source-code that can be built on Linux, Solaris, and other UNIX-like operating systems is now available. This isn't the first time there's been a delay in getting a new SPECViewPerf out for these operating systems, but back in 2006 when SPECViewPerf 9.0 was released it had taken them three months to make the Linux version available.

The SPECViewPerf 10.0 Linux copy weighs in at 585MB, which is a bit smaller than SPECViewPerf 9.0.3. The tests (or "viewsets" as described by SPEC) include 3DS Max, CATIA, EnSight, Maya, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks, UGS Teamcenter Visualization Mockup, and UGS NX. There are no new tests compared to SPECViewPerf 9.0, but this release does drop the Lightscape (light-08) view-set.

By default, SPECViewPerf 10 continues to run as a single-threaded application, but it isn't until manually running RunDual.csh or RunQuad.csh that two or four threads will be used for dual-core and quad-core processor systems, respectively. Likewise, the anti-aliasing isn't used by default but one must manually run runms.csh or modify the user configuration file. However, Phoronix Test Suite 0.8.0 will ship with a SPECViewPerf 10.0 profile (the profile is named specviewperf10) and this work can already be found in its git repository. When running SPECViewPerf 10.0 from the Phoronix Test Suite, it will default to using multiple threads in SMP-capable systems based upon the number of automatically detected cores.

We are currently evaluating SPECViewPerf 10.0 and we will be delivering Linux results from this workstation OpenGL benchmark in the near future. More information on SPECViewPerf 10.0 is available at SPEC.org.

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