For those who have trouble finding their way through the myriad methods used by workstation makers to measure graphics performance – each method, naturally, carefully selected to show off only the good points of a particular product – the new benchmark produced by Dallas company Workstation Laboratories may be of use. Dubbed the Ghrafstone (just how many more hideous derivations of Whetstone are there?), the rating is designed for two dimensional graphics systems and measures the speed of a system in drawing some 13 types of basic graphic elements lines, rectangles, circles and so on. The company uses primarily the C language but says the ratings have proved relatively language-independent, and adds that it uses graphics libraries resident on each machine – such as GKS – rather than trying to take advantage of very low-level graphics features. Workstation Laboratories gives two types of rating: display Ghrafstones, which ignores the screen resolution, and pixel Ghrafstones which take screen resolution into account and are therefore considered by the company to be most important. A benchmark for three dimensional graphics systems, which will add measurement of shading and other features, is under development. A few Pixel Ghrafstone ratings supplied by the company are listed below (the higher the number, the better): Apollo DN4000 11,100 Sun 3/50 1,677 IBM RT 6150 4,082 Compaq 386/20 MS-DOS 1,463 Apollo DN3000 4,074 IBM PS/2-70 20MHz 1,059 Sun 3/160 2,126 IBM PS/2-80 16MHz 913
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