About

About SPEC^®

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC^®) is a non-profit corporation formed to establish, maintain and endorse standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance and energy efficiency for the newest generation of computing systems. SPEC develops benchmark suites and also reviews and publishes submitted results from member organizations and other benchmark licensees. There are six groups developing benchmarks and tools under the SPEC umbrella — Embedded Group (EG), Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG), High Performance Group (HPG), International Standards Group (ISG), Open Systems Group (OSG) and Research Group (RG). 

Our Group

The Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG) develops a range of graphics and workstation benchmarks and performance reporting procedures. These benchmarks are worldwide standards for evaluating performance that reflects real-world user experiences with popular applications.

Our Vision

Our vision is to empower users with tools to discover their workstation’s full performance potential. 

Our Mission

Our mission is to build robust benchmarks measuring the most relevant use cases for popular workstation applications.

Our Committees

The GWPG is a steering body for the following three committees, providing a forum for identifying new benchmark opportunities, coordinating activities of existing committees, and making recommendations regarding direction, priorities and schedules for group-wide activities. 

• The SPEC Application Performance Characterization (SPECapc^®) committee, founded in 1997, develops benchmarks that span popular CAD/CAM, digital content creation and visualization applications. The benchmarks are application-based, meaning the tests are run within the application, and require a licensed version of the application.
• The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc^®) committee, founded in 1993, develops benchmarks to measure the performance of the graphics or GPU component of workstation-class systems. The benchmark workloads are created by capturing and replaying the OpenGL and Direct X application programming interfaces (API) calls when running workstation applications. The tests represent graphics content and behavior from applications, but do not require the application to be installed.
• The SPEC Workstation Performance Characterization (SPECwpc^®) committee, founded in 2012, develops benchmarks that measure the performance of workstation-class systems running algorithms used in popular applications without requiring the full application and associated licensing to be installed on the system under test.

Our Policies

Benchmark Development Goals

• Develop standardized performance evaluation tools that are unambiguous, vendor-neutral measures for product evaluation and comparison.
• Provide mechanisms that enable vendors, customers and others to perform their own performance measurement and evaluations.
• Provide software releases to the public based on current graphics and workstation-class applications in a timely fashion.

History

The GWPG was originally formed in 1986 under the National Computer Graphics Association (NCGA). The NCGA was dedicated to developing and promoting the computer graphics industry, and held an annual conference similar to SIGGRAPH. GWPG joined SPEC in 1996, recognizing the value of creating standard benchmarks for the computer industry.