HHS wrote:It would really help if we had a benchmark.
Comparing FGFS 2.0.0 on different computer systems, OS, graphic cards etc.
Several people mentioned that they would like to have some form of "benchmark" to run FlightGear on various different platforms to see how it performs.
I think the idea is not that bad, and that this might actually help troubleshoot some issues.
Also, I do think that such a benchmark could probably be implemented directly in FlightGear, just by using Nasal scripting and some custom XML files.
This would be pretty much related to the idea of "feature scaling" which was discussed in the other thread.
One would only need a way to create a default situation (i.e. like a custom preferences.xml file) and a way to dynamically toggle FlightGear features on/off and tweak them at runtime.
This should be pretty straightforward to do, at least for those features (configuration properties) that are already using listeners or that are read every frame. This applies to most of the recent graphics additions (i.e. shaders), because these can be dynamically enabled, disabled and configured.
So a FlightGear benchmark would then only have to be run with common default settings (e.g. window resolution, color depth, startup airport, aircraft and environment settings) while a Nasal script could then be used to dynamically tune these settings.
Reading internal counters (namely the framerate counter for the time being) would then give us an instrument to see how significant certain settings are.
So, is there any interest in a FlightGear/Nasal based benchmark?