The project was initiated by Angelo “Encelo” Theodorou in the beginning of 2006. He wrote on the official GL O.B.S about-page:
“We have to face the truth, there is no serious 3d benchmarking tool in the Free Software panorama, and this is why GL O.B.S. was born.Technically speaking GL O.B.S. is based around a PyGTK interface that launches OpenGL programs feeding them with a common CLI options set which will affect their behaviour, then receives back their statistical output.
The idea is that, just like FutureMark (R) 3DMark (TM), the user can upload the results obtained by a test and share it with other users, in order to have a database of hardware performances.”
My task in the project was to create visual interesting benchmarks and to establish a working mechanism that could make GL O.B.S. a standard-benchmark-tool for anyone interested in his or her graphics-performance. This way, the nasty “lets compare our glxgears-performance”-behavior could be outdated and people could compare overall-performance without installing and downloading huge commercial games.
GLOBS benchmark using a postprocessing filter to achieve a toon-look.
Per-Pixel-Lighting Shader