Linux / UNIX: Test Graphical Performance ( 3D Acceleration / FPS )

by Vivek Gite on August 29, 2009 · 12 comments

How do I test my graphical performance including FPS under Linux operating system? How do I find out if 3D acceleration support is included or not under Linux?

You need to use the glxgears program is a port of the "gears" demo to GLX. It displays a set of rotating gears and prints out the frame rate at regular intervals. It has become quite popular as basic benchmarking tool.

Open a terminal and type the following command:
$ glxgears

Fig.01: glxgears in action (FPS rate is displayed in background)

Fig.01: glxgears in action (FPS rate is displayed in background)

Above is a result from my Quadro FX 570/PCI/SSE2. FPS rate < 1000 means you either lack 3D acceleration support or driver is not loaded.

Featured Articles:

Share this with other sys admins!
Facebook it - Tweet it - Print it -

{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Alexei August 29, 2009

Duuno where you got this < 1000 FPS advice. FPS < 1000 simple means that your card is old. For example, my card is NVidia GeForce 4 MX440, and together with CPU AMD Sempron2500+ it is only capable to display 270 FPS.

However, driver is loaded, 3D acceleration works, and Compiz is doing great job.

Reply

2 Corben August 29, 2009

Alexei, check your settings again.

Reply

3 Model9 August 29, 2009

Interesting command. So what is considered as the best FPS for desktop apps, games and some 3D/CAD/CAM stuff? 30? 100? 1000?

Reply

4 Johan August 29, 2009

Mine averages to about 440 FPS on an Intel Mobile GM965. I always thought this adaptor doesn’t support 3D acceleration. Anyway, “lsmod” doesn’t reveal any driver loaded for this pretty much integrated adaptor.

Reply

5 M.S. Babaei August 29, 2009

awesome!!

Reply

6 kgas August 31, 2009

glxgears out put alone won’t judge the graphics card performance. A lot is there in the net to support this. For eg in Arch Linux forum this had been extensively discussed and If I remember correct there is also a mention about this in the kernel mailing list.
I have 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics card and shows 297 FPS. Compiz works fine. If you resize the glxgears window the FPS rate will differ.

Reply

7 Fabiano September 3, 2009

My NVIDIA 8600GT – gets: 17457 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3491.376 FPS
AMD DUAL CORE X2 5000 + 64bit UBUNTU

Reply

8 Linux User September 6, 2009

“It has become quite popular as basic benchmarking tool.” … According to most technical users is this totally wrong. It is just a demo or a test, nothing more. A simple google search tells more:
http://www.google.com/search?q=glxgears+is+not+a+benchmark

Reply

9 sarvesh September 21, 2009

I recently compiled a kernel linux-2.6.31 over linux-2.6.29, it rebooted 2-3 times after grub loader is not loading the grub and boot directory is also missing.

Reply

10 sarvesh September 21, 2009

how to install grub loader?

Reply

11 Phoebe September 26, 2009

my system crashed and I reinstalled with the CD. I can’t get past the window for “user name and password”? What can I do? I have tried every combination of of passwords and nothing is working!

Reply

12 Corben September 27, 2009

Phoebe, boot system from CD (rescue mode) and remove password from /etc/shadow or try single user mode. It depends what OS have you got.

Reply

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes for your code and commands: <strong> <em> <ol> <li> <u> <ul> <blockquote> <pre> <a href="" title="">
What is 15 + 10 ?
Please leave these two fields as-is:
Solve the simple math so we know that you are a human and not a bot.




Previous post:

Next post: