Introduction

Introduction

machtest is a thorough benchmark for graphics cards.

Not a fancy one, though.

If you want a good looking, eye candy graphics tests, go and search somewhere else. This is the real stuff. This is the gfx test for neards. It has literary thousands of command line options. It is easily extensible. It has its own scripting language (well, sort of). It tests for all OpenGL extensions, before performing the according tests. It can produce machine readable output. It can run 5 milliseconds or several days for one test. It can scan-check arguments. It is written in lousy coded C, with loads of really perverted macros. It can give you nightmares, if you love well-structured code.

So what is it good for? First of all: never trust a benchmark you haven't written. At least, don't trust it if you don't know exactly, what it's all about. So I wrote my own, which performs basic tests, that can be influenced in almost every single aspect by options.

Second: Did you ever had to decide, whether a particular gfx card suites your very needs? And then, did you easily port your major application to the new system in order to test it? In many cases, machtest can be used with an according option line to test the performance of the rendering options your application uses.

In order to be able to compare a lot of high-end graphics systems, I started to collect output data of machtest for several machine types.

Before I forget it, there seems to be something special about machtest's screen output. Despite not being fancy or sexy at all, it is quite strange to look at. So do not worry if the others start to call you 'flimmer-man' when you are doing lots of benchmarks ;^)

And just in case you want to know: The background has been created with
machtest loop=1 clearcol=white clear trisize=60 pointcol=mixcolor arraysize=600 gouraud=t texjitter=4 texsize=128 texnum=32 mipmap=t texformat=rgb5a1 texture=tex2d triarray time=10 wait
and some tweaking with gimp.