New 2005 benchmark coming

http://www.swcommunity.com/news_full.php?cpfeatureid=2222

WT

 

How can these things be benchmarks? Every year they change. So the one thing
that really needs benchmarking, SW, convienently is left out of the
equation. Hmmmm.

Let's say a drag race was a bench mark. 1/4 mile timed run from a standing
start this year. Next year its 1000 ft., next year 1500 ft., next year a
1/4 mile but down a 1 percent grade. Anybody have any idea how this would
give a bit of data that could be used to compare cars and tuners?

Mike Wilson's ship in a bottle still stands as a reliable consistent
comparison because it hasn't changed.

Let's call these demo-marks.

 

Dale,

SW benchmarks test SW more than the hardware. For instance, SW is terrible
at releasing memory. What if, during the run, it overflowed to the page
file. This is only one flaw. I'm sure others here can think of many more. I
certainly wouldn't base a hardware purchasing decision on it.

I agree with P. The ship in a bottle tests computational speed, and OpenGL
performance. The only other important metrics are disk speed, just buy fast
ones. Or if you really want to get fancy, run the SPEC suite. That's a
managed standard.

Regards

Mark

04.

 

Why wouldn't we want to benchmark the software?

And how does the benchmark help with legacy hardware?

The original SPECapc benchmark from which this one was probably
derived was primarily a graphic card benchmark. Not really that useful
in everyday applications.

Further, this benchmark is not likely open source like the SPEC
benchmarks are so we can't really be sure what we are testing.

If you are going to be benchmarking hardware I am not sure how a
changing benchmark is going to help with that. Do you really think
that if SW2005 runs certain forced rebuilds 5% slower than SW2004 on
the same hardware that this new benchmark is going to somehow tell you
that buying a new piece of hardware will make up for the slower
running on 2005?

The only thing I have found this kind of benchmark good for is burning
in hardware and checking relative performance when tuning the system.

Finally, if you look at the hardware test websites like Anandtech and
Tom's they tend to use the same benchmarks year after year. There must
be a reason.