From: rick@sundance.SJSU.EDU (Richard Warner)
Subject: Re: WinBench
Organization: San Jose State University - Math/CS Dept.
Lines: 36

al@col.hp.com (Al DeVilbiss) writes:

>jorge@erex.East.Sun.COM (Jorge Lach - Sun BOS Hardware) writes:
>> Is there any FTP site that carries WinBench results for different graphics
>> cards? In Excel (XLS) format? What is the latest version of WinBench and
>> how do they differ? Is the source available, and has anybody try to port it to
>> X-Window, at least in a way that will make comparisons possible?
>> 
>On ftp.cica.indiana.edu in pub/pc/win3/misc/winadv.zip is a writeup by
>Steve Gibson of InfoWorld with winbench 3.11 and a number of other 
>benchmark results for nine isa and four VLB video cards.  This is a 
>very current upload and is likely to have any card you're currently 
>giving serious consideration.  Not in XLS format.  Latest version of
>WinBench that I know of is ver 3.11.  I believe they try to maintain
>the same rating scale between versions, and new versions are released
>to defeat the lastest coding tricks put in by driver programmers to
>beat the benchmarks.  Don't know on the last one.

And why they are considering using WinBench as a test, they may want
to read everything Steve Gibson has said on the subject in his
InfoWorld column the past couple of month.  In short, virtually
every board manufacturer cheats on the test by writing things in the
driver that is there only to make the board appear faster on the
WinBench suite.  So the WinBench score has no bearing in reality to
how cards stack up on real world tasks.

In the last PC-Magazine they benchmarked some of the new accelerators,
and admitted that many of them 'cheated' on WinBench.  Interestingly,
they 'allowed' one type of cheating behaviour (caching for bitblt
operations, no matter how unreal), yet did not allow a couple of other
types of cheating behaviour that some of the cards used.  At least
one card was eliminated from the "Editor's Choice" because of
cheating on the benchmark.

>Al DeVilbiss
>al@col.hp.com
