Update, update, update… Who's got the update?

I really like this app. I have been using it on all my Macs over the years and it can really give great insights on how your machine is performing. I really hope the developer fixes it so we can use it in Lion. PLEASE *-) I think there are many of us.

These days, Geekbench seems to be the better tool (it's still updated and is a better indicator of modern Mac and Mac OS X performance).

The only thing Geekbench is missing is a hard drive benchmarking feature. Xbench has this.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20855/geekbench

Xbench is a highly popular 'benchmarking' suite for Mac OS X. The current version is released as a universal binary and is only 52k larger than its 644k predecessor.

While I am glad that more developers are releasing UB applications, I think this may represent a 1 step to the side two steps back approach for Xbench, merely because of the change in the baseline machine.

A Baseline was established and existed for months prior to this. Most of the benchmarks on current machines that exist on the web and many older ones use the older standard. Now everything must be recalculated and adjusted. This is find for the Xbench site (simple recalculation) and for the application except smaller numbers mean slightly lower levels of precision. For third party sites that did reviews based on the previous baseline set it becomes a task. Do you round each task up, round down, leave it alone? A lot of the old reviews can't get the hardware to do this sort of test again. So, I think a markdown for the benchmark is required. The step forward is just that we can get a test result from an intel based mac. Note: Although there weren't any/many intel specific optimizations performed, the intel part was compiled w/ gcc 4 while the ppc w/ 3.3? Sounds like it should be fair.

The text drawing (quartz) bug is still present; if you run it a couple of times the characters are mapped and the test result is about 4x larger than a first time run. For applications like this several runs should be done to get a good 'mark'.

So, if you want to compare your machine to reviews online you may want to keep your older xbench version around since this one doesn't gain you much.

Xbench does not work. I was running the graphics benchmarks many times in a row. After three times the text benchmark increased 100% all of a sudden. Other results improved as well, but not as much. If nothing in the setup has changed this should not happen.
Therefore I do not believe Xbench is a reliable tool for benchmarking. When looking at some results reported at XLR8YourMac is see the same thing happening.