A New Linux Game To Try And Benchmark

While most of the native Linux games that can be easily automated are built atop the id Tech engine or some spin-off there of the open-source id Tech 2/3/4 engines, here's something new to play with this weekend. There's also some early results to explore.

The latest native Linux game test addition to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org is CoreBreach.

CoreBreach is the game from the Austrian-based CoreCode studio that originally wrote the game for Mac OS X and then ported it to Linux using GNUstep. This futuristic anti-gravity racing game was released for Linux in late 2011. In early June was when I shared that CoreBreach was looking to go open-source.

For the past few weeks with CoreCode I have been communicating with them about making this multi-platform racing game more testing friendly. They ended up not only spinning a custom version of the CoreBreach racing game for benchmarking on Mac OS X and Linux, but they also created the Phoronix Test Suite test profile so that this can now be fully automated by simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark corebreach. That will fetch the needed test dependencies (SDL, etc), download the (free) custom spin of CoreBreach, set it up, and then proceed to run the racing benchmark at your choice of resolution and anti-aliasing mode.

Thanks to this contribution from the Austrian studio, and particularly Julian Mayer, there's now a uniquely new OpenGL benchmark to use by the community and for graphics driver developers to try out for hitting new code-paths in Gallium3D / Mesa. This will hopefully as well make more people aware of CoreBreach and drive some new sales of the game so they hit their open-sourcing milestone.

CoreBreach now lives alongside Xonotic, Prey, Quake Wars, Warsow, VDrift, and the many other open (and closed) source games that can be easily executed in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software. (There's even Wine-based benchmarking courtesy of CodeWeavers.)

Creating this test profile is a very easy win for CoreCode, plus it will also generate them extra media attention such as this article and the game will now also be automatically used in future graphics card and driver comparisons, etc. It was very easy for them to create the test profile and they figured it out mostly all on their own. The immense information of real-world data they are then able to collect can then illustrate if there's any Linux graphics drivers hitting sub-optimal code-paths for the game's custom engine or any other performance-related matters in general that they can use to improve the game and their customers' experience.

For those not familiar with how easy it is to write a test profile for PTS/OpenBenchmarking.org, it's a simple collection of XML files and bash scripts. Here's the contents of the CoreBreach test profile to show just how simple it is to automate using our open-source testing framework.

If you are curious about the CoreBreach performance or want some reference numbers to compare to, here's some data I have collected over the past day:
- A performance comparison of NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Linux graphics drivers for this anti-gravity racing game on Ubuntu. (Above are just some of the results.)

- GeForce GT 220 and GeForce 9500GT benchmarks.

- Anti-aliasing results when using the NVIDIA binary graphics driver on a Lenovo ThinkPad notebook.

- While FSAA works for the binary Linux graphics driver, it doesn't for Mesa/Gallium3D at this point.

- Update: Now here's also some tests comparing the AMD Catalyst and Radeon Mesa Gallium3D performance for this OpenGL racing game.
Find out more information from the corebreach test profile page. Run this benchmark with Phoronix Test Suite 3.x/4.x by simply executing phoronix-test-suite benchmark corebreach.

In related news, here is the OpenBenchmarking.org June 2012 summary of data that's been collected over the past month. On Friday also marked the release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 Milestone 4.

Details on the CoreBreach game itself are available from CoreCode.at.