A Christmas Gift For Phoronix Readers - Improving Graphs

[NathanG]

Happy Christmas and holidays!

[Nille_kungen]

I would like a graphics benchmark to clearly state the API used like if it's an OpenGL or Vulkan.
Also i proton or wine is used and what API it uses like DXVK vulkan.
It's hard to keep track of what i see in a benchmark is it native, steam proton, wine, dx9, vulkan, OpenGL, dxvk, gallium nine, CMTS? there's so many ways to run games on linux these days that is not native and i often don't have a clue to what i am looking at in benchmarks.

[cybertraveler]

Something I'd like is a dynamic graph filtering feature that would let me filter out data I wasn't interested in. When you compare lots of things (e.g. graphics cards) in a single graph I normally only look for a few specific ones of those things. The other entries are just noise to me. I also ignore certain data (like max fps).

One possible way you could do dynamic filtering is:

• Add a filtering button in each graph.
• When clicked a new row would appear on screen with input boxes and check boxes.
• Input boxes would allow you to enter strings which would instantly filter the rows below. e.g. if AMD, Intel and NVIDIA graphics cards are listed in a row, I could type "AMD" to allow only rows with "AMD" in the name to come through.
• Checkboxes would allow you to selectively show hide certain data in the result (e.g. show/hide max fps).
• All filtering would be instantly applied.
• The filter created by the user would be representable as a FILTER STRING that could be copied.
• The user could paste the FILTER STRING into other graphics to instantly apply their filter to that graph. It may have no effect if the data has different column header names and different variable names represented. This wouldn't raise an error; it would just do nothing.
• If its convenient to share state between graphs on a page, then you could even add a button to "Use previous filter". Tooltip: "Use the filter string from last graph that has one. This isn't guaranteed to be relevant to this graph."

This is purely my preference. I don't know if other users would appreciate it.

[dnebdal]

For the summary graphs, it would be interesting to see a plot sorted by the relative performance of the configuration being reviewed (or some arbitrarily selected one, if you're just comparing a field of candidates). Something like the current radar plots, but unfolded back into a (vertical) linear plot; with e.g. the worst result up top and the best at the bottom. On one hand, it would lose the thematic grouping of the tests, but on the other hand it would make it easier to see both how often one performs better than the other, and what sort of tests are in either end.

[Luke]

The graphs are no longer relevent to me, as they are only shown to ad-enabled (3ed party JS etc) users or those with premium subscriptions. There never has been and never will be any benchmark important enough for me to expose my hardware to Corporate America's "online credit rating" and "shopper value" hardware databasing trackers, and not being employed I am in no position to subscribe to anything. No problem, I can settle for bare text, which is light on the server load.

[JAYL]

Something I'd like would be a link to a specific graph or run. Often times I want to link a specific benchmark to someone and have to link the entire article. I usually link the article (which involves going to incognito mode to get pages so I can link the appropriate page for non premium users) then direct them to which graph because there is no way to link them straight to the graph I'm talking about. I usually link the article anyways for overall context, but it'd be nice to link specific graphs to show them exactly which one I am talking about.

[cybertraveler]

...I can settle for bare text, which is light on the server load.

Did you ever use the Dillo browser? Really nice light browser. Sadly no longer developed and it's barely even maintained.

[Luke]

Did you ever use the Dillo browser? Really nice light browser. Sadly no longer developed and it's barely even maintained.

Oh yeah: used it in DSL (Damned Small Linux) on a Pentium 2/133 mhz laptop back in 2009.

[Michael]

When drawing graphs, Min FPS is an irrelevant statistic (like Max FPS), it's a single frame that could screw the whole statistics. But a 95 percentile, if you could implement that, it would give a much better impression with regards to its performance.

For the frame time graphs it shows a box plot that in turn shows the prominent percentiles (and could also add 95th) but for most games sadly they only display average FPS (and then for some min / max FPS), so in those cases of just showing minimum FPS with no frame-time graph box plot it's due to a limitation of the game/engine.

[Michael]

Better scaling for mobile would be good, currently the graphs are cut off in vertical mode.

(And there are also some other issues on mobile forum usage...)

What browser? Recently there were some Firefox mobile issues but all other issues should be addressed AFAIK.