vkmark is an extensible Vulkan benchmarking suite with targeted, configurable scenes.

To build vkmark you need:

• the meson build system
• a C++14 compiler
• libvulkan and development files
• libglm development files (header only library)
• libassimp and development files

for the X11 backend:

• libxcb and development files
• libxcb-icccm and development files

for the wayland backend:

• libwayland-client and development files
• wayland-protocols >= 1.12

for the KMS backend:

• libdrm and development files
• libgbm and development files

On a recent Debian/Ubuntu system you can get all the dependencies with:

$ sudo apt install meson libvulkan-dev libglm-dev libassimp-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev libwayland-dev wayland-protocols libdrm-dev libgbm-dev

vkmark uses the meson build system.

To configure vkmark use:

$ meson build

This will create a vkmark build configuration in the build directory.

To see/set the full list of available options use:

$ mesonconf [-Dopt=val] build

To build use:

$ ninja -C build

To install use:

$ [DESTDIR=...] ninja -C build install

After installing you can run vkmark with:

$ vkmark [options...]

You can run vkmark from the project directory without installing with:

$ build/src/vkmark --winsys-dir=build/src --data-dir=data [other-options...]

vkmark offers a suite of scenes that can be used to measure various aspects of Vulkan performance. The way in which each scene is rendered is configurable through a set of options. To list the available scenes and their acceptable options you can use the -l, --list-scenes command line option.

In vkmark, a benchmark is defined as a scene plus a set of option values. You can specify the list and order of the benchmarks to run by using the -b, --benchmark command line option (possibly multiple times). If no benchmarks are specified, a default set of benchmarks is used. If a benchmark option is not specified it assumes its default value (listed with -l, --list-scenes).

As a special case, a benchmark description string is allowed to not contain a scene name (i.e. to start with ':'). In this case, any specified option values are used as the default values for benchmarks following this description string.

To run the default benchmarks:

$ vkmark

To run a benchmark using scene 'vertex' with a 'duration' of '5.0' seconds and 'interleave' set to 'false':

$ vkmark -b vertex:duration=5.0:interleave=false

To run a series of benchmarks use the -b, --benchmark command line option multiple times:

$ vkmark -b vertex:duration=5.0 -b clear:color=1.0,0.5,0 -b cube

To set default option values for benchmarks and run them:

$ vkmark -b :duration=2.0 -b vertex:interleave=true -b vertex:interleave=false -b :duration=5.0 -b cube

To set default option values for the default benchmarks and run them:

$ vkmark -b :duration=2.0

vkmark tries to automatically detect the most suitable window system to use. If this fails, or you want to override the automatic detection mechanism, you can use the --winsys command-line option. For example, to force the XCB window system use:

$ vkmark --winsys xcb