Better benchmarks

glxgears

I'm tired of using glxgears as my video benchmark. From now on, I'm using http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=home

Hopefully this is popular enough that there are summaries already done for all the hardware that I care about. Ahh, here is exactly what I'm looking for: http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/

Bummer. I'm mainly interested in a graphics benchmark, but phoronix is much more complicated than that. After looking through it, there are graphics tests, but the most interesting ones don't run on OS X. And they take about an hour to run. I don't care that much about graphics performance. I just want a number that will change if I switch between using an optimized driver versus a vanilla driver. And I suppose I want to know how efficient the graphics subsystem is for gaming or playing video. Maybe I can just run quake myself and count frames per second...

webgl

Another nice option for stressing the video subsystem is using webgl: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/webgl-cubes/?f=webgl

It works in Chrome, and uses very little CPU, but is good at putting stress on the video. Enough to pretty much crush the UI in Gnome. And it emits a simple frames per second number.