9. PCMark05

We test performance at the system and component level with PCMark05. The benchmarking program runs tests involving both single and multiple simultaneous (multithreaded) tasks. PCMark05 includes the following test suites:

System: hard disk drive Windows XP startup, 3D graphics and physics, 2D transparent windows, 3D pixel shader, Web page rendering, file decryption, 2D graphics memory (64 lines), hard disk drive general usage, video encoding and audio compression [multithreaded]; text editing and image decompression [multithreaded]; file encryption, virus scan, memory latency and file compression [multithreaded] CPU: file compression, file decompression, file encryption, file decryption, image decompression, audio encoding, file compression and encryption [multithreaded]; file decompression, file decryption, audio decompression, image decompression [multithreaded] Memory: memory read, memory write, memory copy, memory latency (all with 16 MB, 8 MB, 192 kB and 4 kB block sizes) Graphics: 2D transparent windows, 2D graphics memory (64 lines), 2D graphics memory (128 lines), 2D video playback, 3D fill rate, 3D polygon throughput, 3D pixel shader, 3D vertex shader Hard Disk Drive: XP startup, application loading, general usage, file write

For more on PCMark05 see this white paper.

Selecting tests for PCMark05 to run.

PCMark05 reports scores for each of the above test suites. Scores for a suite are based on the geometric mean of the results for all of the tests within the suite. Each geometric mean is scaled using a multiplier based on PCMark results from low and higher end reference systems. This is done so that scores for each of the five test suites range between 1200 and 5500 PCMarks, with an entry level system near the bottom of the range and a high-end system at the top. The entry level and high-end systems were those available at the time PCMark05 was developed. As might be expected, PCMark scores have exceeded 5500 as systems have become more powerful. We will adjust the score scales on our charts as our PCMark05 test results exceed 5500.

After a PCMark05 run the user interface displays the test suite scores.