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Category: TouchXPRT release cycle

TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview 3 is available

Today we are releasing TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview 3 (CP 3). As we discussed in the blog, CP 3 resolves an issue reported on some systems, where the Create Slideshow test would take longer than expected to complete due to the output video not rendering correctly.

As with all community previews, TouchXPRT 2016 CP 3 is available only to community members. Members may download the preview from the TouchXPRT tab in the Members’ Area.

For more details about TouchXPRT 2016, please consult the release notes for further details (login required).

After you try out CP 3, please send us your comments. Either post them to the forum or mail them to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com. If you send us information that’s relevant to the entire community, we may post an anonymous version of your comments to the forum.

Thanks for your participation!

Detective work

A few weeks ago, we described an issue with TouchXPRT’s Create Slideshow test. On some systems, this test would take longer than expected to complete due to the output video not rendering correctly. Since then, we released TouchXPRT 2016 CP2, which includes a check that verifies the output and reports an error if there’s a problem.

It took a lot of detective work, but I’m happy to say that we’ve been able to resolve this issue. We had to make a couple of changes. First, we changed the pixel format in which the photo content is read from GUID_WICPixelFormat32bppPBGRA to GUID_WICPixelFormat32bppBGR. Second, we changed the media format of the input into the video converter from MFVideoFormat_ARGB32 to MFVideoFormat_RGB32.

After making these changes, the Create Slideshow test ran in the expected amount of time, and rendered the output video correctly.

In our testing so far, results have not changed noticeably. However, we’re continuing to test. We want to be sure that the updated build is stable and that results are comparable to earlier TouchXPRT CPs. We’ll then release it to the community.

Here’s looking forward to the release of TouchXPRT 2016 to the world at large!

Looking forward

If you’re in the US, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, and that you survived Black Friday!

On Monday, we released the second community preview for TouchXPRT 2016 (CP2). It detects the issue we described last week, by checking whether the Create Slideshow scenario completes correctly, and alerts you if it does not. We’re continuing to investigate this issue and will let you know as soon as we have more information. Results from CP2 are comparable to results from CP1. Please let us know if you have any questions or problems.

In other news, I’ll be at CES 2016 in Las Vegas in January. I can’t wait! We’re going to have some big news after the first of the year. I can’t say anything about it yet, but I’m looking forward to discussing it with folks there. If you’re planning to be at CES, send me a message, and let’s meet!

Eric

News about TouchXPRT

Some community members reported that, on some systems, the TouchXPRT Create Slideshow from Photos workload was taking a long time to complete.  We found that the output video does not correctly render when this happens. This affects both TouchXPRT 2014 and TouchXPRT 2016.

So far we have only seen this problem on systems with some of the newer AMD graphics drivers. It appears that older AMD drivers and drivers from other vendors do not trigger this behavior.

We are still working to identify the root cause but, in the interim, we are updating the workload to verify its output. This would allow TouchXPRT to detect this problem when it occurs and report an error. We expect to have new CP of TouchXPRT 2016 with this fix next week.

For those in the US, I hope you enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday. Among the many things I’m thankful for this year is all the help and support from the community. We could not do it without you.

Eric

The TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview is here!

Today we are releasing the TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview (CP). TouchXPRT 2016 includes the same performance workloads as TouchXPRT 2014, but we have rebuilt it as a Universal Windows app. This makes TouchXPRT 2016 compatible with systems running Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile.

Because this is a community preview, it is available only to community members. Members may download the preview from the TouchXPRT tab in the Members’ Area.

The results viewer in the TouchXPRT 2016 CP is not fully functional. Please consult the release notes for further details (login required).

After you try out the CP, please send your comments. Either post them to the forum or mail them to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com. If you send us information that’s relevant to the entire community, we may post an anonymous version of your comments to the forum.

Thanks for your participation!

Things are looking good!

It’s been a couple of weeks since we talked about TouchXPRT 2016. I’m happy to say that we have made great progress since then.

The UI is adapting to the different form factors very well. We’ve tested the resizing on phones and on tablets with the screen snapped to half and quarter screen. While a couple of UI elements still need work, we’ve had no problems running the tests. Here’s how TouchXPRT looks on a phone:

Phone 1     Phone 2

We have also greatly simplified installing the application on phones, so we’re no longer concerned about that.

All in all, things are looking good for releasing the community preview soon. However, we’re going to wait until we can test on the Windows 10 Fall Update (Threshold Build 2).  That’s supposed to be released on November 2. We’re not expecting any problems with the Fall Update, but it’s always to wise to check.

November can’t come quickly enough!

Eric

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