Unix workstation vendors Hewlett-Packard Co, Sun Microsystems Inc, Digital Equiment Corp, Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc recently got together to thrash out a benchmark that measures the graphics display performance of hardware systems. The idea is to enable users to see how fast a particular graphics application runs on different systems with the Picture Level Benchmark, PLB. Until now performance measures such as shaded polygons and vectors per-second have been used, but vendors tend to define these differently. A PLB performance profile is generated when a workstation runs a number of graphics tests – though this does not include picture quality. The group of vendors – which goes by the name of the Graphics Performance Characterisation committee – has come up with a GPCmark for each of the tests, not a single figure of performance, but a price performance study in the US trade press has a Sun Sparcstation-2GX out in front with the lowest price per GPCmark, followed by a DECstation 5000 PXG Turbo and a Hewlett-Packard HP 9000 433 Turbo VRX-T2.
