glxgears

glxgears

glxgears is a simple OpenGL benchmark program that renders rotating gears.
Its primary purpose is to provide a basic visual confirmation that OpenGL is functioning correctly and to give a rough estimate of the system's OpenGL rendering performance.
The frame rate is printed to the console. glxgears is not a sophisticated benchmark and should not be used for rigorous performance analysis.
Factors such as driver updates, window manager compositing, and system load can significantly impact the reported frame rate.
It serves as a sanity check more than an accurate performance measurement tool. It is a part of the mesa-utils package.

The frame rate reported by glxgears is heavily influenced by factors other than the raw rendering performance of the GPU. Window manager compositing, driver updates, and overall system load can significantly impact the results. Therefore, it is not a reliable benchmark for comparing different systems or GPUs.

The output of glxgears typically shows a frame rate in frames per second (FPS). Higher FPS generally indicates better performance. However, bear in mind the caveats mentioned earlier. The program runs until interrupted (e.g., by pressing Ctrl+C). The final output shows statistics about the time spend rendering frames during the execution.

If glxgears fails to run or reports very low frame rates, it may indicate issues with your OpenGL driver installation or hardware acceleration. Try updating your graphics drivers or checking your X server configuration.

glxgears has been a standard tool for testing basic OpenGL functionality for many years. It is part of the mesa-utils package, which has been around since the early days of Linux graphics. While it's rudimentary by modern standards, its simplicity and wide availability have made it a persistent tool for quick OpenGL validation.

glxinfo(1), xrandr(1)