Finland-based Rightware has announced a new UI benchmarking tool called Basemark GUI. It provides objective UI performance benchmarking for smartphones, tablets and other embedded devices. Basemark GUI gives carriers, device manufacturers and semiconductor companies the means to measure holistic UI system performance during all stages of product development.
Tero Sarkkinen, CEO of Rightware said, “The graphics performance of a smartphone, [tablet] or other embedded system has probably never mattered as much as it does today. The user interface has become the focal point of differentiation as consumers tend to judge the goodness of a product based on how the user interface works in these devices.”
He added, “Basemark GUI is the tool for device manufacturers who want to ensure that they choose the right chips and build their device only with the top-notch user interface software.”
This type of UI benchmarking enables device manufacturers and semiconductor vendors to discover the potential bottlenecks of their chips or systems. Basemark GUI not only focuses on graphical processing units (GPUs), but also generates UI workloads that tax the whole system, including GPU, CPU, and disk usage and performance, so that potential problems can be discovered early in the development phase, according to the company.
Basemark GUI provides a comprehensive set of test cases for UI benchmarking. It includes one main test case (the 3D UI test) and several feature tests. The 3D UI test represents a futuristic 3D user interface running a photo browser, volume control and music selector. The feature tests include composition, vertex, animation, texture, blend and battery tests. The test cases generate OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 workloads that tax the graphics system in a realistic way.
Rightware said it worked in close cooperation with several semiconductor, mobile phone and device manufacturers to ensure that the product met the stringent requirements of the industry. Basemark GUI is available for licensing as source code and in a binary version.
