I hadn't expected to release another update so soon, but GfxBench2D version 2.6 had one puzzling problem: the altivec based copy routines actually caused a significant drop in performance on G4 AmigaOne-XEs (A1-XEs). What made this puzzling, was that the altivec copy routines improved performance on G4 Pegasos II machines. Both of these machines use MPC74xx CPUs, so what could be causing this strange behaviour? This was a bit of a mystery.

Both the AmigaOS and Windows versions of GfxBench2D clients have been updated. There was a minor issue in which a graphics card whose name contains particular characters would fail to save. The reason is that files cannot use certain characters, and so attempting to save a file with say, a slash '/' character (which is used to separate directories in a path) would not work. This issue has now been fixed.

Given the complexity of the release process, I guess that it was inevitable that I would forget something with one of the releases. GfxBench2D versions 2.3/2.4 for AmigaOS and 2.7 for Windows were unable to upload results due to me forgetting to update the login details. More importantly, I forgot to test that functionality before releasing it, thus failing to notice the mistake. This has now been fixed with version 2.5 for AmigaOS, and 2.8 for Windows. My sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.

Both the AmigaOS and Windows versions of GfxBench2D have been updated to add an icon. This is something that I always wanted to add, but lacked the time (and I'm not a graphic artist). Anyway, thanks to Thomas Blatt - who created the icon - this is now a reality.

The Windows version of GfxBench2D has received another update. This version includes a workaround for an issue with buggy graphics drivers. On a small number of computers it would hang at the WritePixelArray test. This was due to a driver bug affecting the CopySubresource() function. It would allow the source-buffer to be locked for writing before copying of data from that buffer to the graphics card had completed, potentially enabling the old data to be overwritten before it had been used. Fortunately, there was a different method to wait until the operation was done, which waits for the GPU to be idle. This same method is used prior to each test to ensure the most accurate results.

A minor update to GfxBench2D has been released for both AmigaOS (now at version 2.2) and Windows (now at version 2.5). This is a purely cosmetic update, and does not affect the benchmarking process in any way.

GfxBench2D for Windows is now at version 2.4. It is available at the usual place, i.e., the download page. This version fixes a few bugs, the most important of which is a bug that prevented certain multi-core machines from running the tests. If you find any bugs, please contact me via email, or post to the GfxBench2D forum.

Both the AmigaOS and Windows versions of GfxBench2D have been updated, and are available for download. Some bugs were found in the Windows version over the last few days, resulting in version 2.2. At this stage the Windows version is still considered to be beta. The AmigaOS version is now at 2.1. It incorporates some bug-fixes and changes that were primarily the result of developing the Windows version.

I am please to announce that the Windows version of GfxBench2D is now available. Windows XP or higher is required. The website code has also been updated in order to accommodate multiple Operating Systems (OSes).

Welcome to yet another development log. This post marks the first release of the GfxBench2D benchmark tool, and the corresponding web application (web-app). The benchmark tool tests the performance of graphics cards for a range of different operations, and (optionally) uploads the results to this website for display. While it is still a work-in-progress (isn't most software?), it has reached a point at which it is useful.