Test Driving Futuremarks PCMark 1. Benchmark. Futuremark is a well respected provider of computer benchmark applications. Their PCMark and 3. DMark benchmarks have been around for almost 2. Today, Futuremark is launching PCMark 1. PCMark series of benchmarks first launched in 2. PCMark 1. 0 builds upon the PCMark 8 platform, adds a few workloads and streamlines the rest in order to present a vendor neutral, complete, and easy to use benchmark for home and office environments. Futuremark provided us with a preview copy of the benchmark, and we took it for a test drive. Futuremarks first unified benchmark for evaluation of system performance was PCMark 2. March 2. 00. 2. It was followed by PCMark 0. PCMark 0. 5 with support for Windows Vista. PCMark Vantage was introduced in 2. Windows 7, and PCMark 7 in 2. PCMark 8 was launched in 2. Windows driver version 382. Linux drivers version 381. OpenGL 4. 6 and GLSL 4. Download our TopDesk Windows AltTab replacement software now and find windows fast. Switch between windows faster and quickly find the window youre looking for. Windows 8 8. 1. Even though Windows 1. OS, we have had no issues in processing the PCMark 8 workloads on machines running that OS. PCMark 1. 0 brings official support for Windows 1. PCMark 1. 0, like BAPCos SYSmark 2. SE, caters mainly to system vendors who want to bid for government contracts tenders for high volume PC purchases from businesses and enterprises. The PCMark scores help the vendors in advertising a performance level for their systems. VDrift is a crossplatform, open source driving simulation made with drift racing in mind. The driving physics engine was recently rewritten from scratch but w. Extensive OpenGL programming tutorials and resources. From the other perspective, it can also help businesses to mandate a minimum performance level for systems that they hope to purchase. PCMark 1. 0 measures system performance using workloads based on real world applications and activities reflective of the usage of modern day PCs in an office environment. PCMark 1. 0 comes in three different flavours the Basic edition is free to download, while the Advanced edition costs 3. The Professional edition is the one suitable for business use, and it comes with a host of features that make the benchmark easy to use in an automated manner. Pricing for the professional edition is not public. The PCMark 1. 0 benchmark can be processed in one of three built in modes default, express or extended. These built in modes correspond to benchmark definitions in XML that are supplied along with the installation. User generated XML files conforming to the correct format can be created for custom benchmarks. The Express benchmark is a subset of the default one, which, in itself, is a subset of the Extended benchmark. The express benchmark and focuses on typical office workloads such as web browsing and selected productivity tasks. The Extended tests add demanding graphics and physics test to provide an idea of the CPU as well as the GPU performance. Each of these workloads is composed of sub tests, as shown below. The application start up workload involves measuring the time taken to launch a number of programs of varying complexity such as the Chromium web browser, the Firefox web browser, Libre. Office Writer word processor, and the GIMP image manipulation program. Web browsing tests involve navigation of a social media site, online shopping, map navigation, video playback H. VP9 at 1. 08. 0p and 4. SXvswINJYY/VciOvDsCC2I/AAAAAAAADK0/4FokJpI36xs/s1600/opengl-3.png' alt='Opengl Windows 10' title='Opengl Windows 10' />Intel HD Graphics Driver v10. Available for Windows, New OpenGL 4. Extensions. RenderDoc is a free MIT licensed standalone graphics debugger that allows quick and easy singleframe capture and detailed introspection of any application using. K resolutions, and a static web page, using both Firefox and Chromium. The video conferencing workload deals with both low quality one on one conferencing 7. H. 2. 64 encode and decode, as well as face detection running on an available Open. CL device or CPU, as well as high quality group conferencing 1. H. 2. 64 encode, and 3x 7. H. 2. 64 decode, as well as face detection. Productivity tests involve word processing using Libre. Office Writer and spreadsheet editing using Libre. Office Calc. Digital content creation tests involve photo editing using Image. Magick, capable of Open. CL acceleration with various filters, video editing using ffmpeg, capable of Open. CL acceleration for downscaling, sharpening and deshaking, and rendering and visualization. The last workload uses the Open. GL 4. 3 code path from 3. DMarks Sling Shot workload, and a custom POV Ray workload. The gaming tests are directly from the 3. DMark Fire Strike workload. Setting up the Evaluation Flow. We processed PCMark 1. The details of the systems are presented in the next section. The first step was to create an installation script. Though PCMark 1. 0 offers an uninstall option, I have found it better to create a system image prior to installation of such benchmarks. This provides us with an option to perform System Image Recovery to go back to the prior version. Towards this, I created the following Powershell script, assuming that a USB drive with the volume label PCImage. Backups is connected to the system. Backup. Volume Get Volume File. System. Label PCImage. BackupsBackup. Drive Backup. Volume. Drive. Letter Write Host n. Using Backup. Drive for backing up. Admin start backup backup. Target Backup. Drive include C ,D all. Critical quiet. Write Host n. Installing PCMark 1. C Program FilesFuturemarkPCMark 1. PCMark. 10. Cmd. exe registerlt PCMark. Pro Key After executing the above script resident in the same folder as pcmark. USB drives. CWD Get Item Path. Verbose. Full. Name C Program FilesFuturemarkPCMark 1. PCMark. 10. Cmd. exe definitionpcm. CWDbmark. pcmark. CWDbmark. extended. Processing the above script generated the benchmark results in the same folder as that of the script. The results file could be opened in the PCMark 1. PDF held a portable copy of the high level results and system information. BAPCo SYSmark 2. 01. SE A Comparison. BAPCos SYSmark 2. SE was released recently, and it caters to the same market segment as the Futuremark PCMark 1. Having set up an evaluation flow using SYSmark 2. SE recently, it was interesting to try out PCMark 1. The SYSmark 2. 01. SE flow is considerably more complicated, as it uses commercial versions of programs such as Adobe Acrobat. This creates issues with clean uninstallation of the benchmark the system image creation scripting was done as a solution for that initially. Fortunately, PCMark 1. SYSmark 2. 01. 4 SE tries to ensure that all OS settings are consistent across different benchmark runs as long as a particular profile is loaded. Unfortunately, PCMark 1. OS settings. In the course of our evaluation of PCMark 1. OS settings, making it the prerogative of the benchmark processor to ensure consistency while evaluating different systems. We document that, as well as additional selected sensitivity analysis, in the next section. Open. GL Wikipedia. Not to be confused with Open. CL. Open. GLVideo games outsource real time rendering calculations to the GPU over Open. GL. The rendered results are not sent back to main memory, but to the framebuffer of video memory instead. The display controller will then send this data to the display device. Original authorsSilicon Graphics. DevelopersKhronos Groupformerly ARBInitial release. January 1. 99. 2 2. Stable release. 4. July 3. 1, 2. 01. Written in. C1Type. D graphics APILicense. Open source license for use of the S. I. This is a Free Software License B closely modeled on BSD, X, and Mozilla licenses. Trademark license for new licensees who want to use the Open. Airsoft Buying Laws there. GL trademark and logo and claim conformance. Websiteopengl. Open Graphics Library Open. GL34 is a cross language, cross platformapplication programming interface API for rendering 2. D and 3. Dvector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit GPU, to achieve hardware acceleratedrendering. Silicon Graphics Inc., SGI started developing Open. GL in 1. 99. 1 and released it in January 1. CAD, virtual reality, scientific visualization, information visualization, flight simulation, and video games. Since 2. 00. 6 Open. GL has been managed by the non profittechnology consortium. Khronos Group. An illustration of the graphics pipeline process. The Open. GL specification describes an abstract API for drawing 2. D and 3. D graphics. Although it is possible for the API to be implemented entirely in software, it is designed to be implemented mostly or entirely in hardware. The API is defined as a set of functions which may be called by the client program, alongside a set of named integer constants for example, the constant GLTEXTURE2. D, which corresponds to the decimal number 3. Although the function definitions are superficially similar to those of the programming language C, they are language independent. As such, Open. GL has many language bindings, some of the most noteworthy being the Java. Script binding Web. GL API, based on Open. GL ES 2. 0, for 3. D rendering from within a web browser the C bindings WGL, GLX and CGL the C binding provided by i. OS and the Java and C bindings provided by Android. In addition to being language independent, Open. GL is also cross platform. The specification says nothing on the subject of obtaining, and managing an Open. GL context, leaving this as a detail of the underlying windowing system. For the same reason, Open. GL is purely concerned with rendering, providing no APIs related to input, audio, or windowing. DevelopmenteditOpen. GL is an evolving API. New versions of the Open. GL specifications are regularly released by the Khronos Group, each of which extends the API to support various new features. The details of each version are decided by consensus between the Groups members, including graphics card manufacturers, operating system designers, and general technology companies such as Mozilla and Google. In addition to the features required by the core API, graphics processing unit GPU vendors may provide additional functionality in the form of extensions. Extensions may introduce new functions and new constants, and may relax or remove restrictions on existing Open. GL functions. Vendors can use extensions to expose custom APIs without needing support from other vendors or the Khronos Group as a whole, which greatly increases the flexibility of Open. GL. All extensions are collected in, and defined by, the Open. GL Registry. 7Each extension is associated with a short identifier, based on the name of the company which developed it. For example, Nvidias identifier is NV, which is part of the extension name GLNVhalffloat, the constant GLHALFFLOATNV, and the function gl. Vertex. 2h. NV. 8 If multiple vendors agree to implement the same functionality using the same API, a shared extension may be released, using the identifier EXT. In such cases, it could also happen that the Khronos Groups Architecture Review Board gives the extension their explicit approval, in which case the identifier ARB is used. The features introduced by each new version of Open. GL are typically formed from the combined features of several widely implemented extensions, especially extensions of type ARB or EXT. DocumentationeditOpen. GLs popularity is partially due to the quality of its official documentation. The Open. GL Architecture Review Board released a series of manuals along with the specification which have been updated to track changes in the API. These are almost universally known by the colors of their covers The Red Book. Open. GL Programming Guide, 8th Edition. ISBN 0 3. 21 7. A tutorial and reference book. The Orange Book. Open. GL Shading Language, 3rd edition. ISBN 0 3. 21 6. A tutorial and reference book for GLSL. Historic books pre Open. GL 2. 0 The Green Book. Open. GL Programming for the X Window System. ISBN 9. 78 0 2. A book about X1. Open. GL Utility Toolkit GLUT. The Blue Book. Open. GL Reference manual, 4th edition. ISBN 0 3. 21 1. XEssentially a hard copy printout of the Unix manual man pages for Open. GL. Includes a poster sized fold out diagram showing the structure of an idealised Open. GL implementation. The Alpha Book white coverOpen. GL Programming for Windows 9. Windows NT. ISBN 0 2. A book about interfacing Open. GL with Microsoft Windows. Associated librarieseditThe earliest versions of Open. GL were released with a companion library called the Open. GL Utility Library GLU. It provided simple, useful features which were unlikely to be supported in contemporary hardware, such as tessellating, and generating mipmaps and primitive shapes. The GLU specification was last updated in 1. Open. GL features which are now deprecated. Context and window toolkitseditGiven that creating an Open. GL context is quite a complex process, and given that it varies between operating systems, automatic Open. GL context creation has become a common feature of several game development and user interface libraries, including SDL, Allegro, SFML, FLTK, and Qt. A few libraries have been designed solely to produce an Open. GL capable window. The first such library was Open. GL Utility Toolkit GLUT, later superseded by freeglut. GLFW is a newer alternative. These toolkits are designed to create and manage Open. GL windows, and manage input, but little beyond that. GLFW A cross platform windowing and keyboard mouse joystick handler is more game orientedfreeglut A cross platform windowing and keyboard mouse handler its API is a superset of the GLUT API, and it is more stable and up to date than GLUTOpen. GL Utility Toolkit GLUT An old windowing handler, no longer maintained. Several multimedia libraries can create Open. GL windows, in addition to input, sound and other tasks useful for game like applications. Allegro 5 A cross platform multimedia library with a C API focused on game development. Simple Direct. Media Layer SDL A cross platform multimedia library with a C APISFML A cross platform multimedia library with a C API and multiple other bindings to languages such as C, Java, Haskell, and Go. FLTK A small cross platform C widget library. Qt A cross platform C widget toolkit. It provides many Open. GL helper objects, which even abstract away the difference between desktop GL and Open. GL ESwx. Widgets A cross platform C widget toolkit.