Computer benchmarking applications abound for Windows machines, but what if you want to judge the capabilities of your current Mac against one you're considering buying? Though I'm in that situation far less often than I'd prefer, when I do need to measure the relative performance of two different Macs, I turn to Xbench.
Xbench is a free performance benchmarking utility that measures the following items: CPU, Threads, Memory, Quartz Graphics (2D), OpenGL Graphics (3D), User Interface, and Disk. For a full list, including the sub-categories of what Xbench measures, check the bottom of the Xbench
homepage.
When you run the app you can run all or only some of the tests, however running the entire suite only takes a few minutes. When you're done, you're presented with a report showing how your machine performed in each area.
By itself, it isn't that interesting, but if you send your report to Xbench's website using the Submit button, you can then compare it against other machines' scores.
Tags: apple, benchmarks, computer benchmarking, ComputerBenchmarking, graphics, memory, opengl, performance benchmarking, PerformanceBenchmarking, relative performance, RelativePerformance, threads, user interface, UserInterface, xbench
