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Category: Performance benchmarking

HDXPRT: see how your Windows PC handles media tasks

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on June 22, 2017

Over the last several weeks, we reminded readers of the capabilities and benefits of TouchXPRT, CrXPRT, and BatteryXPRT. This week, we’d like to highlight HDXPRT. HDXPRT, which stands for High Definition Experience & Performance Ratings Test, was the first benchmark published by the HDXPRT Development Community, which later became the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community. HDXPRT evaluates the performance of Windows devices while handling real-world media tasks such as photo editing, video conversion, and music editing, all while using real commercial applications, including Photoshop and iTunes. HDXPRT presents results that are relevant and easy to understand.

We originally distributed HDXPRT on installation DVDs, but HDXPRT 2014, the latest version, is available for download from HDXPRT.com. HDXPRT 2014 is for systems running Windows 8.1 and later. The benchmark takes about 10 minutes to install, and a run takes less than two hours.

HDXPRT is a useful tool for anyone who wants to evaluate the real-world, content-creation capabilities of a Windows PC. To see test results from a variety of systems, go to HDXPRT.com and click View Results, where you’ll find scores from many different Windows devices.

If you’d like to run HDXPRT:

Simply download HDXPRT from HDXPRT.com. The HDXPRT user manual provides information on minimum system requirements, as well as step-by-step instructions for how to configure your system and kick off a test. Testers running HDXPRT on Windows 10 Creators Update builds should consult the tech support note posted on HDXPRT.com.

If you’d like to dig into the details:

Check out the Exploring HDXPRT 2014 white paper. In it, we discuss the benchmark’s three test scenarios in detail and show how we calculate the results.

If you’d like to dig even deeper, the HDXPRT source code is available to members of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, so consider joining today. Membership is free for members of any company or organization with an interest in benchmarks, and there are no obligations after joining.

If you haven’t used HDXPRT before, give it a shot and let us know what you think!

On another note, Bill will be attending Mobile World Congress in Shanghai next week. Let us know if you’d like to meet up and discuss the XPRTs or how to get your device in the XPRT Spotlight.

Justin

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, HDXPRT, HDXPRT 2012, HDXPRT 2014, HDXPRT capabilities, HDXPRT development process, HDXPRT source code, Let us know your thoughts, Performance benchmarking, Source code, White papers, Windows 10, Windows 8.1, XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight |

Learning something new every day

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on June 1, 2017

We’re constantly learning and thinking about how the XPRTs can help people evaluate the tech that will soon be a part of daily life. It’s why we started work on a tool to evaluate machine learning capabilities, and it’s why we developed CrXPRT in response to Chromebooks’ growing share of the education sector.

The learning process often involves a lot of tinkering in the lab, and we recently began experimenting with Neverware’s CloudReady OS. CloudReady is an operating system based on the open-source Chromium OS. Unlike Chrome OS, which can run on only Chromebooks, CloudReady can run on many types of systems, including older Windows and OS X machines. The idea is that individuals and organizations can breathe new life into aging hardware by incorporating it into a larger pool of devices managed through a Google Admin Console.

We were curious to see if it worked as advertised, and if it would run CrXPRT 2015. Installing CloudReady on an old Dell Latitude E6430 was easy enough, and we then installed CrXPRT from the Chrome Web Store. Performance tests ran without a hitch. Battery life tests would kick off but not complete, which was not a big surprise because the battery life calls involved were developed specifically for Chrome OS.

So, what role can CrXPRT play with CloudReady, and what are the limitations? CloudReady has a lot in common with Chrome OS, but there are some key differences. One way we see the CrXPRT performance test being useful is for comparing CloudReady devices. Say that an organization was considering adopting CloudReady on certain legacy systems but not on others; CrXPRT performance scores would provide insight into which devices performed better with CloudReady. While you could use CrXPRT to compare those devices to Chromebooks, the differences between the operating systems are significant enough that we cannot guarantee the comparison would be a fair one.

Have you spent any time working with CloudReady, or are there other interesting new technologies you’d like us to investigate? Let us know!

Justin

Posted in Battery life, Benchmark metrics, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Performance benchmarking |

CrXPRT: a valuable tool for evaluating Chromebooks

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on May 11, 2017

Last week, we reintroduced readers to TouchXPRT 2016. This week, we invite you to get to know CrXPRT, an app for Chrome OS devices.

When you buy a Chromebook, it’s important to know how long the battery will last on a typical day and how well it can handle everyday tasks. We developed CrXPRT 2015 to help answer those questions. CrXPRT measures how fast a Chromebook handles everyday tasks such as playing video games, watching movies, editing pictures, and doing homework, and it also measures battery life. The performance test, which measures the speed of your Chromebook, gives you individual workload scores and an overall score. The battery life test produces an estimated battery life time, a separate performance score, and a frames-per-second (FPS) rate for a built-in HTML5 gaming component.

CrXPRT completes the battery life evaluation in half a workday, and delivers results you can understand. Before CrXPRT, you had to rely on the manufacturer’s performance claims and estimated battery life. Now, CrXPRT provides an objective evaluation tool that’s easy to use for anyone interested in Chromebooks. To learn more about CrXPRT, check out the links below.

Watch CrXPRT in action:

CrXPRT in action

To test your Chromebook’s performance or battery life:

Simply download CrXPRT from the Chrome Web Store. Installation is quick and easy, and the CrXPRT 2015 user manual provides step-by-step instructions. A typical performance test takes about 15 minutes, and a battery life test will take 3.5 hours once the system is charged and configured for testing. If you’d like to see how your score compares to other Chromebooks, visit the CrXPRT results page.

If you’d like to dig into the details:

Read the Exploring CrXPRT 2015 white paper. In it, we discuss the concepts behind CrXPRT 2015, its development process, and the application’s structure. We also describe the component tests and explain the statistical processes used to calculate expected battery life.

BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members also have access to the CrXPRT source code, so if you’re interested, join today! There’s no obligation and membership is free for members of any company or organization with an interest in benchmarks.

If you have a Chromebook you’d like to evaluate, give CrXPRT a try and let us know what you think!

Justin

Posted in Battery life, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Education, Google Chrome, Performance benchmarking |

Getting to know TouchXPRT

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on May 4, 2017

Many of our community members first encountered the XPRTs when reading about WebXPRT or MobileXPRT in a device review, using TouchXPRT or HDXPRT in an OEM lab, or using BatteryXPRT or CrXPRT to evaluate devices for bulk purchasing on behalf of a corporation or government agency. They know that specific XPRT provided great value in that context, but may not know about the other members of the XPRT family.

To help keep folks up to date on the full extent of XPRT capabilities, we like to occasionally “reintroduce” each of the XPRTs. This week, we invite you to get to know TouchXPRT.

We developed TouchXPRT 2016 as a Universal Windows Platform app for Windows 10. We wanted to offer a free tool that would provide consumers with objective information about how well a Windows 10 or Windows 10 Mobile laptop, tablet, or phone handles common media tasks. To do this, TouchXPRT runs five tests that simulate the kinds of photo, video, and music editing tasks people do every day. It measures how quickly the device completes each of those tasks and provides an overall score. To compare device scores, go to TouchXPRT.com and click View Results, where you’ll find scores from many different Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile devices.

TouchXPRT is easy to install and run, and is a great resource for anyone who wants to evaluate the performance of a Windows 10 device.

If you’d like to run TouchXPRT:

Simply download TouchXPRT from the Microsoft Store. (If that doesn’t work for you, you can also download it directly from TouchXPRT.com.) Installing it should take about 15 minutes, and the TouchXPRT 2016 release notes provide step-by-step instructions.

If you’d like to dig into the details:

Check out the Exploring TouchXPRT 2016 white paper. In it, we discuss the TouchXPRT development process, its component tests and workloads, and how it calculates individual workload and overall scores. We also provide instructions for automated testing.

BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members also have access to the TouchXPRT source code, so consider joining today. There’s no obligation and membership is free for members of any company or organization with an interest in benchmarks.

If you haven’t tried running TouchXPRT before, give it a shot and let us know what you think!

Justin

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Mobile devices, Performance benchmarking, Performance testing on tablets, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2016, TouchXPRT development process, TouchXPRT results |

Evolve or die

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on April 20, 2017

Last week, Google announced that it would retire its Octane benchmark. Their announcement explains that they designed Octane to spur improvement in JavaScript performance, and while it did just that when it was first released, those improvements have plateaued in recent years. They also note that there are some operations in Octane that optimize Octane scores but do not reflect real-world scenarios. That’s unfortunate, because they, like most of us, want improvements in benchmark scores to mean improvements in end-user experience.

WebXPRT comes at the web performance issue differently. While Octane’s goal was to improve JavaScript performance, the purpose of WebXPRT is to measure performance from the end user’s perspective. By doing the types of work real people do, WebXPRT doesn’t measure only improvements in JavaScript performance; it also measures the quality of the real-world user experience. WebXPRT’s results also reflect the performance of the entire device and software stack, not just the performance of the JavaScript interpreter.

Google’s announcement reminds us that benchmarks have finite life spans, that they must constantly evolve to keep pace with changes in technology, or they will become useless. To make sure the XPRT benchmarks do just that, we are always looking at how people use their devices and developing workloads that reflect their actions. This is a core element of the XPRT philosophy.

As we mentioned last week, we’ve working on the next version of WebXPRT. If you have any thoughts about how it should evolve, let us know!

Eric

Posted in Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Browser-based benchmarks, Future of performance evaluation, Google, JavaScript, Performance benchmarking, What makes a good benchmark? |

Thinking ahead to WebXPRT 2017

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on April 13, 2017

A few months ago, Bill discussed our intention to update WebXPRT this year. Today, we want to share some initial ideas for WebXPRT 2017 and ask for your input.

Updates to the workloads provide an opportunity to increase the relevance and value of WebXPRT in the years to come. Here are a few of the ideas we’re considering:

  • For the Photo Enhancement workload, we can increase the data sizes of pictures. We can also experiment with additional types of photo enhancement such as background/foreground subtraction, collage creation, or panoramic/360-degree image viewing.
  • For the Organize Album workload, we can explore machine learning workloads by incorporating open source JavaScript libraries into web-based inferencing tests.
  • For the Local Notes workload, we’re investigating the possibility of leveraging natural-brain libraries for language processing functions.
  • For a new workload, we’re investigating the possibility of using online 3D modeling applications such as Tinkercad.

 
For the UI, we’re considering improvements to features like the in-test progress bars and individual subtest selection. We’re also planning to update the UI to make it visually distinct from older versions.

Throughout this process, we want to be careful to maintain the features that have made WebXPRT our most popular tool, with more than 141,000 runs to date. We’re committed to making sure that it runs quickly and simply in most browsers and produces results that are useful for comparing web browsing performance across a wide variety of devices.

Do you have feedback on these ideas or suggestions for browser technologies or test scenarios that we should consider for WebXPRT 2017? Are there existing features we should ditch? Are there elements of the UI that you find especially useful or would like to see improved? Please let us know. We want to hear from you and make sure that we’re crafting a performance tool that continues to meet your needs.

Justin

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Browser-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation, Let us know your thoughts, Machine learning, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2017, What makes a good benchmark? |

Check out the other XPRTs:

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