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Category: Benchmarking

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

Looking forward

If you’re in the US, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, and that you survived Black Friday!

On Monday, we released the second community preview for TouchXPRT 2016 (CP2). It detects the issue we described last week, by checking whether the Create Slideshow scenario completes correctly, and alerts you if it does not. We’re continuing to investigate this issue and will let you know as soon as we have more information. Results from CP2 are comparable to results from CP1. Please let us know if you have any questions or problems.

In other news, I’ll be at CES 2016 in Las Vegas in January. I can’t wait! We’re going to have some big news after the first of the year. I can’t say anything about it yet, but I’m looking forward to discussing it with folks there. If you’re planning to be at CES, send me a message, and let’s meet!

Eric

TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview 2 is available

Today we are releasing TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview 2 (CP 2). As we discussed in the blog, some systems with newer AMD graphics drivers have trouble rendering the Create Slideshow from Photos output video. CP 2 includes a validation feature that produces an error when this problem occurs. This is the only change from the first community preview.

As with all community previews, TouchXPRT 2016 CP 2 is available only to community members. Members may download the preview from the TouchXPRT tab in the Members’ Area.

For more details about TouchXPRT 2016, please consult the release notes for further details (login required).

After you try out CP 2, please send us 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!

News about TouchXPRT

Some community members reported that, on some systems, the TouchXPRT Create Slideshow from Photos workload was taking a long time to complete.  We found that the output video does not correctly render when this happens. This affects both TouchXPRT 2014 and TouchXPRT 2016.

So far we have only seen this problem on systems with some of the newer AMD graphics drivers. It appears that older AMD drivers and drivers from other vendors do not trigger this behavior.

We are still working to identify the root cause but, in the interim, we are updating the workload to verify its output. This would allow TouchXPRT to detect this problem when it occurs and report an error. We expect to have new CP of TouchXPRT 2016 with this fix next week.

For those in the US, I hope you enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday. Among the many things I’m thankful for this year is all the help and support from the community. We could not do it without you.

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!

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