Q:

How to perform a detailed and quick 3D performance test

I am wondering how to quickly test performance of my 3D graphics. Since glxgears is not benchmark what should I use. Also glxgears sometimes stuck at 60FPS, you cannot even compare before/after driver update (e.g. adding xorg-edgers PPA). Even glxgears doesn't really work out of box.
One possibility is screensavers, but you can't see FPS. I am also not willing to install 600MB nexuiz, specially if I am running on Live-CD. Other 3D games are also very big... Unigine tests are too demanding for opensource drivers (problems with too low OpenGL and probably texture compression (S3TC...)). I would also like to test OpenGL 2.x extentions.
How to quickly test your 3D performance?

A:

Ubuntu since 11.04 comes with benchmarks glmark2 and glmark2-es2 which are quite good to perform simple benchmark (with shader) and are very light for download.
glmark2 is actively developed by Linaro group. With each new release, new and more demanding benchmarks are coming. https://launchpad.net/glmark2
Benchmark also runs well on devices (ARM, OpenGL-ES2 based), so it's good (hardware) cross platform comparison. glmark2-es2 running on OMAP4/powervr Pandaboard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5jg9D1lH5Y

A:

Unigine has a Linux version of their benchmarks with different shader levels support, could be worth checking out:
http://unigine.com/download/
This is also included in the Phoronix test suite, which has lots of other automated graphics (and other) testing options as well.
http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/
In short, use the software centre to install php5-cli as a dependency for Phoronix, then download the Phoronix tarball and extract it. Detailed usage manuals can be found on the Phoronix site.

A:

The chromium-bsu and gltron games in Ubuntu have a much smaller installation footprint than nexuiz and both feature a FPS counter. If I wanted to quickly test, I'd go this way.

