BeagleBoard GPUBx - A GPU Benchmarking tool
Shreyas Iyer
BeagleBoard® contains an onboard GPU, capable of 2D/3D rendering, which can be manipulated through OpenGL ES 2.0. Offloading complex instructions onto the GPU from the CPU is evidently advantageous, since presence of multiple cores in the GPU, all working in parallel, would result in a much faster computation, as compared to the CPU.
So, through this project, using GLSL along with OpenGL ES, we develop a benchmarking suite of programs which make use of custom shaders which provide intensive computations to the GPU, at the end of which we compute how efficient the GPU was, and in turn benchmark the GPU.
The GPU will be tested for various parameters, with programs like:
Fractal shaders, whose computation reflects the memory bandwidth of the GPU.
Graphically-intensive shaders (2D and 3D) for testing the rendering capability of the GPU, which includes:
Procedurally-generated terrain using noise functions (Perlin noise in particular), changing the amplitude of the noise dynamically, and checking for performance drops.
Ray marching in complex 3D environments.
Ocean shader, using Perlin noise and Fresnel shading.
Shaders where vertex data is altered according to noise function, resulting in a dynamically changing mesh. (3D)
Post-processing effects, such as Bloom, HDR, Depth of Field (DoF), and more.