With its Viewperf benchmark firmly established and GLperf ready to go public, the OPC project group is moving ahead in its planning for future benchmarks.

After much discussion at its December meeting in San Diego, the OPC group decided to begin investigating a benchmark that would record graphics-related activities within an application and play them back to measure performance. The group felt that this type of capture/playback benchmark would allow users to get a more accurate measurement of how graphics capabilities are exercised within a real application.

OPC project group members are currently investigating issues related to the capture/playback approach, including compression to reduce file sizes, testing sequences, reverse mapping to memory, parceling data in chunks to minimize CPU and memory interference, portability across different platforms, cooperation with independent software vendors (ISVs), and how to extract and measure individual frames from an application.

As always, the OPC project group welcomes input from all those interested in graphics performance benchmarking.