Kishonti's GFXBench 3.1 Available, Even As The Company Begins Work On GFXBench 5.0

At the MWC, Kishonti Informatics launched GFXBench 3.1, with full support for the latest OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics API. GFXBench was formerly known as GLBenchmark (for Android and iOS) and DXBenchmark (for Windows).

The new GFXBench 3.1 adds more graphics-intensive tests including a new Manhattan test with features such as computer shaders, depth of field and HDA, which can stress the GPU significantly more than the previous version. As you can see in the graph below, the new Manhattan achieves about 25 percent fewer frames per second than the previous Manhattan test from GFXBench 3.0.

Kishonti has also done some geometry asset optimizations in the new test so that there is now 30 percent less geometry.

There are now new low-level tests in GFXBench 3.0. The new tests better approximate the workload of the Manhattan test. They are called: Fill 2, Driver Overhead 2 and ALU 2.

The new test results now include temperature, CPU and GPU frequencies, as well as frame time graphs for more in-depth information.

An important addition to GFXBench is ASTC support, a next-generation texture compression format pushed by ARM and the Khronos Group, of which Kishonti is a member.

Now that it launched the new GFXBench 3.1 with support for the latest mobile graphics APIs that are already supported by most new mobile GPUs on the market, Kishonti is looking to the future.

The company announced plans for a future release of GFXBench 5.0, which will focus on supporting the next-generation low-level APIs such as the recently-announced cross-platform Vulkan API from Khronos, Windows-only DirectX 12 from Microsoft, and iOS-only (at least for now) Metal from Apple.

If you're wondering why it's not called GFXBench 4.0, it's likely because there won't be an OpenGL ES 4.0 anymore, and Vulkan is, in a way, "OpenGL ES 5.0."

The new low-level APIs such as Vulkan will enable high-performance graphics rendering with low CPU usage, which allows GPUs to run longer without exceeding the system's thermal limit. Thus, system builders can put more powerful GPUs in their devices.

GFXBench 5.0 will arrive with the following features:

Introduces a new, low-overhead solution designed to further increase the parity between benchmarks for different 3D graphics APIs Outdoor night scenery with lots of unique animated objects casting shadowsThe scenery requires large number of draw calls (more than 6,000) to showcase high-performance rendering with dramatically reduced CPU usage and driver overhead

Metal is already out, but Vulkan and DirectX 12 won't be available until later this year, so we'll see GFXBench 5.0 come out most likely in the first half of 2016. The latest GFXBench 3.1 can already be installed from the Play Store.

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