March 5, 2012 -- The dEQP Score is a part of the drawElements, Ltd. Quality Program, a unique system for analyzing and improving GPU and driver quality, currently featuring close to 10,000 tests covering functional correctness, performance, stability, accuracy and feature support for OpenGL ES 2.0 and related APIs.

The new dEQP Score combines the results of all these tests with drawElements' GPU expertise to produce a weighted high-level metric that accurately represents the versatility, compatibility and maturity of different GPUs and driver stacks. This allows everyone from GPU and system-on-chip providers to OEMs, operators and developers to easily compare different solutions and monitor the development of new products.

Until now GPUs have been compared exclusively on performance, whereas the dEQP Score provides a simple way to rank different platforms based on all the different factors that contribute to the end-user experience, as well as ease of development. This is becoming increasingly important as GPUs are adopted for use cases such as user-interface acceleration and web-based graphics. The integration of GPU rendering in operating systems and web browsers means that a single bug might affect all applications running on the platform as well as compromising the security and integrity of the device.

To ensure that the dEQP Score is relevant to how developers actually use GPU acceleration, it is produced by weighting the results of each test in the drawElements Quality Program according to several different criteria, including feature usefulness and overall market support. In practice, this means that failing to support a popular or API-mandated feature is clearly penalized, whereas more esoteric differences have less impact on the final score.

Rather than focusing on a limited set of use case benchmarks dEQP provides more holistic approach to GPU quality analysis, as well as more thorough performance testing, to improve the overall experience for developers and end-users.

"Tests on high-end smartphones released in the last 24 months show that GPU and driver performance has increased with each generation of new devices as expected. However, there have not been any similar improvements over time in their capabilities, accuracy or stability, which can vary greatly even between platforms from the same OEMs and SoC vendors. Also, the rise in peak performance does not necessarily indicate increased performance for all features. Most devices show a lot of variation in regard to what they accelerate well, to the point where a minor code change can make performance fall off a cliff." said Pyry Haulos, CTO of drawElements.

drawElements is updating the dEQP Mini Android application to reflect the new dEQP Score and give everyone a chance to do basic benchmarking of their own Android devices. dEQP Mini contains a small subset of the tests available in the full subscription program, as well as reference scores for a selection of commercially available devices. It can be downloaded from the Android Market as well as from the drawElements website free of charge.

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