At its August 21 meeting in Boulder, Colo., the PLB project group and members of the GPC Group discussed the philosophy of the Picture-Level Benchmark, how it should be used, and where it should go in the future.

A primary area of debate was whether customers are interested in comparing performance across different APIs, such as PHIGS and OpenGL. Some participants in the discussion felt there was a need for benchmarking to compare graphics performance across APIs, while others did not think that these comparisons are important to customers.

Some meeting participants think that the different vendor ports of the PLB cause confusion and lessen the credibility of the benchmark. The solution to the problem is making source code public. The PLB group has the means to provide common source code and could do it as early as the end of this year, according to Bill Licea-Kane, vice president of the PLB group.

Meeting participants agreed that the PLB is a good PHIGS benchmark, and there is a strong commitment to the benchmark among PLB project group members. Three possible changes to the benchmark will be discussed by the PLB group over the next few months:

1. providing a single source code that is publicly available;
2. eliminating the reporting of optimized numbers (PLBopt); and
3. providing better, more representative standard benchmark files.

The PLB project group ( gperf@perfit.zko.dec.com) welcomes input from interested parties.