What is glean?

glean is a suite of tools for evaluating the quality of an OpenGL implementation and diagnosing any problems that are discovered. glean also has the ability to compare two OpenGL implementations and highlight the differences between them.

Who should care about glean?

• Anyone who buys or reviews graphics cards.
  glean gives you the ability to compare performance, features, and image quality of different graphics cards. Since the source code is freely available, you can customize glean to add tests for the things that are most important to you.
• Software developers.
  With glean you can learn which features really work for a given combination of hardware and driver. You can also find the timing for basic drawing operations, mode changes, texture downloads, etc. so that you can maximize the performance of your application.
• OpenGL driver developers.
  glean can increase your confidence that your driver software is correct and efficient. It also allows you to compare a new release to a previous release, to make sure that there are no regressions in quality or performance.

glean is provided under an "MIT/X11-style" copyright, which permits it and its derivatives to be used at no cost for both commercial and non-commercial projects.

Acknowledgments

Development of the glean framework and diagnosis tools is supported by VA Linux Systems.

Johan Smet took on the Herculean job of porting glean to Microsoft Windows. The importance of this work cannot be understated! In addition to making glean useful to a great many more people, it enlarges the pool of developers that can contribute to glean.

I'm also grateful to Brian Paul and VA Linux for providing glean's home on the Web.

Cass Everitt suggested several improvements in the ways glean uses C++.

Currently Allen Akin is coordinating enhancements to glean. Please address glean-related correspondence to akin@pobox.com.