The best benchmark for a piece of graphics hardware is your own actual
application, not some marketing benchmark number claimed by some
hardware vendor hyping their own hardware.
To help you quickly determine your application's real rendering speed
on a given piece of hardware, it often helps to isolate the important
rendering code in your application into a small application-specific
benchmark.
Below is source code for an OpenGL
benchmarking harness that uses GLUT. The
harness makes it very easy to construct small application-specific
graphics benchmarks that test out the actual performance of rendering
operations that your application really uses and depends on.
The harness is found in gl_harness.c.
The harness contains GLUT code (including the main routine)
for parsing command line arguments and actually timing the benchmark
run. You simply write the actual rendering code and initialization
code. You write a routine called testInit and another called testRender.
Compile your test code with gl_harness.c
and you've got a benchmark!
For an example of some benchmark code, see torus.c.
For more information about using the GLUT benchmark harness, see
Section 6.6.8 titled "Constructing Application-specific
Benchmarks" in the OpenGL performance section of my book Programming
OpenGL for the X Window System (Addison-Wesley, ISBN
0-201-48359-9). The section's information applies even if you aren't
programming for the X Window System so it is worth checking out.
- OPENGL Web site