exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Whilst testing my HDL for reliability & effectiveness (speed) I've been using a variety of programs to stimulate memory and processor use.

Some are obvious direct benchmarking, speed testing or error checking programs:

* Gembench 6
* YAARTTT
* Memspeed
* Nembench
* Kronos

Some are normal programs/extension that give a good indication of reliability or a visual feel for booster effectiveness

* MiNT (if it boots at all it's good news)
* PM-Doom with the -mem option whacked up (will find memory caching problems that YAARTT won't)
* Frontier

One soak test I do is a combination of Mint, PM-Doom in a window and GB6 on endless loop.

What are everyone else's tips for good memory and/or processor intensive apps or games that will give a good work out to and decent visual feedback for a booster?

Something in between Frontier (not much memory use) and PM-Doom (FPS still too low to reliably benchmark) would be nice as could then do before and after comparisons.

Cheers,

BW.

I use Frontier, Yaart and Gembench but for testing the cpu I leave Frontier running for hours as its killed the most CPUs.

I only really used GB6 and sometimes Frontier here.

One thing to bare in mind with benchmark programs is, unless they check the data of the results they are testing, then they can become a bit pointless for reliability testing. For example, I can benchmark alt-ram without actually having a alt-ram board in place. So you don't know if things are working correctly or not. This is why GB6 is the best program IMO, as you can visually see if something goes wrong. The odd error in programs which just state MB/sec or whatever, probably won't tell you such information (unless it crashes).

Also such benchmark tools only testing say, RAM, or ROM etc at a time, is not reliable testing either. Look at the STE with DMA issues. You can test the HDD all day without error, save desktop.inf and it corrupts every time, why ? Because your mixing bus accesses with ROM and DMA which is where things tend to trip up. If you test HDD and ROM separately, they will test all day without error. I think a lot of people misunderstand GB6's intention, as it's not so much a benchmark tool, but a diagnostic tool.

Once you can run GB6 fine all day(you need to visually check it on every test now and then ) , then you start on games like Frontier as they can hammer the CPU / RAM etc. It's easy to tell if things get corrupted in the game or not.

PhilC wrote: 15 Mar 2021 13:15 I use Frontier, Yaart and Gembench but for testing the cpu I leave Frontier running for hours as its killed the most CPUs.

There was that program I wrote to do in-divs on loop as well...

@exxos yes that got things pretty toasty, I'd forgotten I'd got it.

exxos wrote: 15 Mar 2021 13:24 I only really used GB6 and sometimes Frontier here.

One thing to bare in mind with benchmark programs is, unless they check the data of the results they are testing, then they can become a bit pointless for reliability testing. For example, I can benchmark alt-ram without actually having a alt-ram board in place. So you don't know if things are working correctly or not. This is why GB6 is the best program IMO, as you can visually see if something goes wrong. The odd error in programs which just state MB/sec or whatever, probably won't tell you such information (unless it crashes).

Yeah hence why I like to have a bit of a suite.


The MiNT/Doom/GB6 combo is my current gold standard, but I'm always on the lookout for other visually active stress tests.

BW.

Badwolf wrote: 15 Mar 2021 13:13 What are everyone else's tips for good memory and/or processor intensive apps or games that will give a good work out to and decent visual feedback for a booster?

Something in between Frontier (not much memory use) and PM-Doom (FPS still too low to reliably benchmark) would be nice as could then do before and after comparisons.

How about using a jpeg decoder (be it in GemView or other apps). Very cpu intensive, depending on the jpeg image used you can easily check a large amount of the installed memory and by saving the decoded data into a raw file, you've something you can compare against (bitwise).

pixelpusher wrote: 15 Mar 2021 17:57 How about using a jpeg decoder (be it in GemView or other apps). Very cpu intensive, depending on the jpeg image used you can easily check a large amount of the installed memory and by saving the decoded data into a raw file, you've something you can compare against (bitwise).

Hi pixelpusher,

That's not a bad idea. Something I could script a bit would be nice for a bit of automation.

I'll have a look into that, thanks.

BW.