Guide: 3D Benchmarking with OpenArena

Massman

Posted July 29, 2013

Posted July 29, 2013 (edited)

Hey guys,

So in the Raspberry Pi overclocking guide I published last weekend you can only find a run-down for 3D benching with HWBOT Prime. Of course the Raspberry Pi can also do 3D overclocking! So of course we want this too. So far there are not really any decent 3D benchmarks out there for ARM-based Linux devices, so we will have to stick with our regular game benchmarks. In this thread I will help you install the OpenArena benchmark. OpenArena is based on the Quake3 engine, so benchmarking is pretty much like it was ten years ago .

1) Install Openarena

$ sudo apt-get install openarena
$ wget http://www.berryterminal.com/dl/ioquake3_99.1.36-rpi01_armhf.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i ./ioquake3_99.1.36-rpi01_armhf.deb

The total filesize is about 700MB, so make sure you have enough space. Normally, the download packages will remain on your SD card unless you delete them yourself. You can use this command to remove the files. Don't worry, you don't need them anymore.

$ sudo apt-get clean

After this, you have installed OpenArena.

2) Benchmarking

Again, stay in command mode and run the following command to start OpenArena.

$ sudo /usr/games/openarena

The game will load now. If you were aware during the '90s you will surely recognise the interface. Now, to benchmark use the default config settings and default demo. To start the benchmark, use the following commands in the console. To enable console, press '~'.

timedemo 1 (enables benchmark mode)
cg_drawfps 1 (shows fps when benchmarking)
demo demo001_test1 (loads demo map)

Just wait until it's finished. On my default Raspberry Pi (700arm, 250gpu) it took 434.8 seconds to render 3398 frames at 7.8 fps. 7min 14.6s is a great time for Haswell 4G 32M, but horribly long for a 3D benchmark. So be prepared.

Results (arm/core/gpu/sdram):