Lenvik Alpha 2 Gets Ready For Unigine Heaven

As of this morning the second alpha release for Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" is available for PC benchmarking and testing. Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 Alpha 2 brings many changes, including but not limited to, GTK GUI improvements, test result merging improvements, new command options (analyze-image-delta and analyze-linear-tracker), support for soon-to-be-announced Phoromatic features, and many enhancements to bilde_renderer (our image rendering library that's used for generating the JPG/PNG/SVG/SWF graphs) and in particularly vastly improving the SVG renderer back-end.

Outside of pts-core, new test profiles carried forward in this alpha release of Lenvik is vdrift-fps-monitor, which produces a line graph showing the vDrift frame-rate performance over the course of the test's run, etqw-demo-iqc for performing image quality comparisons with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (see NVIDIA Anti-Aliasing, Linux and Lenvik), improvements to the tiobench test profile, an fs-mark test profile for greater disk testing, and the unigine-heaven test profile is now present. Unigine Heaven will be released for Linux still this month or next and we have already tested it, and once it's officially released the download link will be added and this test profile will "just work" for totally clobbering your graphics card and system with this powerful OpenGL 3.2 benchmark.

Below is the official change-log for Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" Alpha 2, but there are many more changes in this release besides what made it to the changes list. This is likely the final PTS release of 2009 while more test releases will come prior to the official release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.4.0 in February. Download our benchmarking software at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 Alpha 2
December 15, 2009

- pts-core: Start work on having a panel in the GTK2 GUI for managing the PTS modules
- pts-core: Add and implement PostArguments tag to test profile XML specification
- pts-core: Export TEST_ as the HOME directory, similar to the variables when extending a test that are set
- pts-core: Add post-cache-share script support for test profiles to optionally implement that take advantage of PTS cache shares
- pts-core: Merging improvements for handling image quality comparisons, plus other safeguards merged too
- pts-core: More aggressive sleep timer between tests, don't sleep before entering a PTS cache share
- pts-core: Add analyze-image-delta option for carrying out delta image comparisons of test results
- pts-core: Only show "Test All Options" option for tests when there is more than one option to select
- pts-core: Log to the pts-install.xml how long it takes for a test to install
- pts-core: Add pts-test-installation-viewer.xsl for viewing pts-install.xml files
- pts-core: Support merging pts_result_file objects that also have results that need to be renamed
- pts-core: Phoromatic updates
- pts-core: Add analyze-linear-tracker command option
- pts-core: With analyze-all-runs, refresh-graphs, and analyze-linear-tracker there is no need to reprocess the entire XML file, so be more efficient
- phodevi: Clean phodevi_linux_parser::read_sys_dmi() against hal-values-remove.list
- phodevi: Better handle NVIDIA's detailed OpenGL version string
- phodevi: Support for detecting the X.Org vesa driver
- phoromatic: Add support for the server to tell the client module whether to run the install command prior to testing (change from the web interface)
- phoromatic: The Phoromatic server (through the settings area) can now tell test machines to exit PTS when testing is done for the day
- bilde_renderer: Add draw_rectangle_with_border to the drawing API
- bilde_renderer: Add draw_poly_line to the drawing API
- bilde_renderer: Add draw_dashed_line to the drawing API
- bilde_renderer: Use the BILDE_RENDERER define or environmental variable to override the renderer
- bilde_renderer: Vastly improve the SVG renderer back-end, make it proper for Phoromatic usage
- pts: Add vdrift-fps-monitor test profile that charts out the FPS on a line graph during the testing process
- pts: Rename the iqc-nexuiz test profile to nexuiz-iqc
- pts: Add etqw-demo-iqc test profile for image quality comparisons with ET: Quake Wars Demo
- pts: Add iqc test suite for image quality comparison tests
- pts: Begin supporting unigine-heaven test profile
- pts: Overhaul the tiobench test profile
- pts: Add fs-mark test profile
- pts: Add daily-system-tracker test suite