Month: August 2013

Designated Drivers

on August 29, 2013

As we mentioned in last week’s blog On to the next thing, we have seen some problems running HDXPRT 2012 on the Windows 8.1 preview, build 9460. To date, the failures we’ve seen have been in Media Espresso’s Power Director on systems using third and fourth generation Intel Core processors.

We are happy to say that HDXPRT 2012 runs fine on the preview of Windows 8.1 when using the Windows 8.1 Preview Beta Graphics Driver. We are continuing to test, but things are looking good. You can get the graphic driver at communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-21232. We tested with version 15.33.10.3214, which is the latest version available as I am writing this.

If you see problems when running HDXPRT 2012, please let us know.

As I said last week, we are pushing forward on the development of HDXPRT 2013. We are looking forward to releasing a preview to the community in the next few weeks.

Eric

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Posted in HDXPRT, HDXPRT 2012, Windows 8.1 |

On to the next thing

By Eric Hale

on August 22, 2013

Last week, we released MobileXPRT 2013 to the public and published it as a free app on Google Play. On Monday, we will release the source code to the community. It hasn’t been long since we released the source code for MobileXPRT CP 1.1, but it’s an important part of the community model that the source for the current version is available to the community.

While we were putting the finishing touches on MobileXPRT, we’ve been hard at work on HDXPRT 2013. The feedback on HDXPRT made it clear that the benchmark should be smaller, faster, and easier to install. We have been working to keep all the value of the benchmark, and update the workloads to reflect current usage, even as we slim it down.

Speaking of HDXPRT, as we mentioned in The show is in previews, HDXPRT 2012 has issues running on Windows 8.1. However, we have had some success getting HDXPRT to run on Windows 8.1 by using beta drivers from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. We are still investigating this, and hope to have a general workaround for this soon.

There’s lots more stuff in the pipeline. Exciting times ahead!

Eric

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Posted in HDXPRT 2012, HDXPRT 2013, MobileXPRT 2013 source, Windows 8.1 |

Time to Play

By Eric Hale

on August 15, 2013

As Bill said in MobileXPRT 2013 lives!, we released MobileXPRT 2013 to the public on Monday. Since that time, we have published MobileXPRT as a free app in the Google Play Store. You can find it by searching for “mobilexprt” or you can get it here. Downloading the app from the store simplifies the installation, but in all other regards, it’s the same application that you can download from the MobileXPRT site.

We will make the source for the release available to the community in a few days.

We have some MobileXPRT results on the Web site. Some of these results are from our own testing and some are from published articles like this one from Tom’s Hardware. We will be adding more results from devices we test and looking for more articles as time goes on.

We’d love to add your results as well. You can find out how to submit your results here. If you have a blog or publish your own reviews, send us the link. If we include your results, we will link back to your site.

Now on to the next great thing!

Eric

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Posted in Android, MobileXPRT |

MobileXPRT 2013 lives!

By Bill Catchings

on August 12, 2013

On behalf of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, I’m proud to announce that today we are releasing MobileXPRT 2013. MobileXPRT is our benchmark for measuring the performance of Android-based devices. Like the other benchmarks (or XPRTs as we sometimes call them), MobileXPRT attempts to measure performance by using activities that real users do on their devices. For more information, check out our press release http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/8/prweb11016543.htm.

We still have more to do over the next few days. We need to release the source, which we expect to do later this week. We need to make MobileXPRT 2013 available on Google Play. We’ll also work to add more results to our MobileXPRT 2013 results database. Watch this space for more details!

I’d also like to thank those of you that have helped us by developing, testing, or commenting on the Community Preview release. Your efforts have been an important part of making this benchmark available to a larger audience. Please continue to let us know your thoughts, send us your results, and tell us about any problems you find.

Benchmark development is never done!

Bill

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Posted in MobileXPRT |

Fragments

By Eric Hale

on August 1, 2013

The folks over at OpenSignal have created some pretty impressive visualizations of how fragmented the Android marketplace is. Pictures like that are a little daunting as we head to the public release of MobileXPRT 2013. However, the benchmark is looking pretty stable. Since we released MobileXPRT CP1.1 back in June, we have not encountered any problem configurations.

That includes our first encounter with the recently released Android 4.3. We tested MobileXPRT 2013 CP 1.1 on a Nexus 7 running Android 4.3. The benchmark ran with no problem. Here are the scores, along with scores from the same device running Android 4.2.2.

	Android 4.2.2	Android 4.3
MobileXPRT performance	116	120
MobileXPRT user experience	97	98

Of course, WebXPRT 2013 ran on Android 4.3 as well. If you’re curious, here are the scores.

	Android 4.2.2	Android 4.3
WebXPRT	183	185

While the upgrade did not have a big effect on the score in the case of the Nexus 7, we will need to test on more devices before we can make a definitive statement about the effect of Android 4.3.3 on performance.

Eric

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Posted in MobileXPRT, WebXPRT |

Month: August 2013

Designated Drivers

On to the next thing

Time to Play

MobileXPRT 2013 lives!

Fragments

Check out the other XPRTs: