JBenchmark

JBenchmark - JBenchmark 1.0 is a graphical performance measuring tool for the ever spreading Java enabled, color-screen mobile phones and pdas. JBenchmark helps performance hungry customers choosing the right mobile device. (The Java programming language was developed by Sun Microsystems to be portable, which means users can run the same program on different hardware platforms. In recent years a new standard, "Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME)" was developed for mobile devices, which in most cases have quite limited hardware capabilities.)

JBenchmark is a small (28 KByte) Java program (midlet) which can be downloaded freely from the webpage. It contains 5 short (10 seconds each) graphical tests, each trying different aspects of the underlying graphical hardware. During the benchmarking phase the software counts how many frames were drawn on the screen - the final JBenchmark score simply the sum to these.

The first test measures the device's text drawing speed (using random colors). Of course text drawing is not very exciting, but surely the business and networking applications (mail, chat, browsing) use this feature the most.

The second test draws random 2 dimensional shapes on the screen. The J2ME version (MIDP 1.0) recently used in mobile phones is very limited, it is even not able to draw triangles. JBenchmark has its own functions to draw triangles and arbitrary quads (not just rectangles), which is almost essential in any graphical application.

Although small JAVA devices doesn't have the processing power to run Quake 3 in its true 3 dimensional form (and unfortunatelly MIDP 1.0 doesn't know floating point numbers and trigonometrical functions which are essential to do 3D transformations) the third test tries the impossible by drawing a dancing 3D cube in realtime.

The fourth test is rather boring one: without direct framebuffer drawing, the software tries to fill the screen with small random colored squares. Usually this is the slowest part of the test, which shows the lack of direct pixel addressing in the current standard (if it used single pixels and not squares, most of the devices weren't able to draw 2 frames per 10 seconds).

The last test runs well on most of the machines: shows a simple animated Globe. The frames are cut from a PNG image, so the pixel size of the Globe is the same on every device.

After all the 5 test was accomplished JBenchmark shows the Score and also the details of each test-run (higher number means more drawn frames). The software shows other interesting properties too, like Java version, hardware platform, number of colors, memory, etc.

After the successful run JBenchmark users can also upload their results to www.jbenchmark.com. The uploaded results will be analysed by JBenchmark developers and put into the official, public result database (which already has a couple of interesting numbers).