xpbench » Uncategorized http://www.xpbench.com xpbench Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:04:15 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 Stardock XPBench – The Importance of Drivers http://www.xpbench.com/stardock-xpbench-the-importance-of-drivers.html http://www.xpbench.com/stardock-xpbench-the-importance-of-drivers.html#comments Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:37:17 +0000 admin http://www.xpbench.com/?p=5 For example, many of the alpha blending effects in Windows XP benefit from driver support for layered windows. Some drivers include support for layering and others do not.

A card that is fast at 3D games that doesn’t support these APIs will be significantly slower in 2D.

]]> http://www.xpbench.com/stardock-xpbench-the-importance-of-drivers.html/feed 0 Stardock XPBench http://www.xpbench.com/stardock-xpbench.html http://www.xpbench.com/stardock-xpbench.html#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:43:48 +0000 admin http://www.xpbench.com/?p=1 Despite the name, XPBench is not really designed to be a skinning benchmark program (we suggest checking out programs like SkinBench for that). Rather, XPBench is specifically designed to query which Windows XP features a video card/driver combination supports and then to demonstrate the performance improvements supporting the XP API’s makes.

At this time, XPBench checks for the following:

1. Does the driver support constant alpha blending (this improves the performance of fade effects as an example)

2. Does the driver support per pixel alpha blending (window shadows make use of this)

We strongly encourage you to read the Drivers page to learn more, especially about why drivers are often a weak link in the system and its performance.

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