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Category: Collaborative benchmark development

Nebula Wolf

A couple of months ago, we talked about the senior project we sponsored with North Carolina State University. We asked a small team of students to take a crack at implementing a game that we could use as the basis of a benchmark test.

Last Friday, the project culminated with a presentation at the annual Posters and Pies event.

Nebula Wolf

The team gave a great presentation, and I was impressed by how much they accomplished in 3 months. They implemented a game that they called Nebula Wolf – the mascot for NC State is a wolf. It’s a space-themed rail shooter. You can play the game, or click a button to run a script for benchmarking purposes. In the scripted mode, Nebula Wolf unlocks the frame rate so the device can run at full speed.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be testing Nebula Wolf, digging into the code and getting a deeper understanding of what the team did. We’re hoping to make the game available on our web site soon.

Tomorrow, AJ, Brien, and Rachel will present one last time, here at PT. It’s been a real pleasure working with them. I wish them all good luck as they finish college and start their careers.

Eric

Please let us know

Todd Reifsteck from the Web Platform Team at Microsoft was kind enough to let me share a conversation we had last week:

Todd reported he was having problems running WebXPRT on the Edge browser. This was a surprise to us, as we’d already released a WebXPRT update to resolve Edge browser issues.

We were not seeing this problem, and as we talked with Todd we verified there was no issue in WebXPRT itself. The fix we released was working; however, we found a path through the web site that launched the previous version of WebXPRT. Once we fixed that URL to point to the latest version of WebXPRT, Todd reported that WebXPRT was working with Edge, just as we expected.

This problem would not have affected results on other browsers. The results from the previous version of WebXPRT are comparable to the current version. Compatibility with the Edge browser is the only difference between the versions.

Thanks to Todd for his help. As always, we encourage you to contact us if you have any issues or questions. We’ll do our best to resolve them as quickly as possible.

Eric

The TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview is here!

Today we are releasing the TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview (CP). TouchXPRT 2016 includes the same performance workloads as TouchXPRT 2014, but we have rebuilt it as a Universal Windows app. This makes TouchXPRT 2016 compatible with systems running Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile.

Because this is a community preview, it is available only to community members. Members may download the preview from the TouchXPRT tab in the Members’ Area.

The results viewer in the TouchXPRT 2016 CP is not fully functional. Please consult the release notes for further details (login required).

After you try out the CP, please send your comments. Either post them to the forum or mail them to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com. If you send us information that’s relevant to the entire community, we may post an anonymous version of your comments to the forum.

Thanks for your participation!

The TouchXPRT 2016 CP arrives tomorrow!

As we said a couple of weeks ago, we wanted to test on Windows 10 Threshold 2 before releasing the TouchXPRT 2016 community preview. Well, Threshold 2 is out and the testing has been going very well.

TouchXPRT2016_CP

We’ll release the TouchXPRT 2016 to the community tomorrow. Because community previews are not available to the general public, members will need to download it from our site.

The installation procedure is fairly straightforward. First, you put the device in developer mode. Then, for a tablet or PC, run a PowerShell script, as you did for TouchXPRT 2014. For a mobile device, once it’s in developer mode, copy the bundle to the device and install it.

If you have any problems, please let us know.

We’re looking forward to seeing the results from phones and, as we have done with MobileXPRT, to comparing results across different-sized devices.

Enjoy!

Eric

Things are looking good!

It’s been a couple of weeks since we talked about TouchXPRT 2016. I’m happy to say that we have made great progress since then.

The UI is adapting to the different form factors very well. We’ve tested the resizing on phones and on tablets with the screen snapped to half and quarter screen. While a couple of UI elements still need work, we’ve had no problems running the tests. Here’s how TouchXPRT looks on a phone:

Phone 1     Phone 2

We have also greatly simplified installing the application on phones, so we’re no longer concerned about that.

All in all, things are looking good for releasing the community preview soon. However, we’re going to wait until we can test on the Windows 10 Fall Update (Threshold Build 2).  That’s supposed to be released on November 2. We’re not expecting any problems with the Fall Update, but it’s always to wise to check.

November can’t come quickly enough!

Eric

Question we get a lot

“How come your benchmark ranks devices differently than [insert other benchmark here]?” It’s a fair question, and the reason is that each benchmark has its own emphasis and tests different things. When you think about it, it would be unusual if all benchmarks did agree.

To illustrate the phenomenon, consider this excerpt from a recent browser shootout in VentureBeat:

 
While this looks very confusing, the simple explanation is that the different benchmarks are testing different things. To begin with, SunSpider, Octane, JetStream, PeaceKeeper, and Kraken all measure JavaScript performance. Oort Online measures WebGL performance. WebXPRT measures both JavaScript and HTML 5 performance. HTML5Test measures HTML5 compliance.

Even with benchmarks that test the same aspect of browser performance, the tests differ. Kraken and SunSpider both test the speed of JavaScript math, string, and graphics operations in isolation, but run different sets of tests to do so. PeaceKeeper profiles the JavaScript from sites such as YouTube and FaceBook.

WebXPRT, like the other XPRTs, uses scenarios that model the types of work people do with their devices.

It’s no surprise that the order changes depending on which aspect of the Web experience you emphasize, in much the same way that the most fuel-efficient cars might not be the ones with the best acceleration.

This is a bigger topic than we can deal with in a single blog post, and we’ll examine it more in the future.

Eric

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