(c) 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co., a division of Ziff Communications Co. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
A Solid Showing / applications running under emulation perform admirably
You can run your current 680x0 software on a Power Mac but not at rocket-ship speeds. Worst case, Power Macs run software written for 680x0 Macs under emulation at speeds equal to those on an LC III. Other programs' speeds equal those on a fast 68040 Mac. Granted, you aren't buying a Power Mac to run applications at 68040 speeds, but as more applications are reworked for the PowerPC and as Apple updates more of its system software, your Power Mac will perform even faster. In our application-based tests, all scores are referenced to those of an LC III with an optional FPU, which are assigned a score of 10.
Processor
The Processor test measures raw processing power and is a good indicator of a machine's overall speed.
Floating Point
The speed of floating-point operations is important for such tasks as scientific calculation and 3-D rendering.
Video Mix
This test indicates how quickly a Mac will respond when performing such tasks as screen redraw and scrolling a graphic.
Disk Mix
This test gauges the speed of disk-intensive operations, such as opening a large file or searching a database.
Word
Even on the 8100/80, Microsoft Word performed poorly under emulation in this search-and-replace test.
Excel
We ran a macro that recalculated a business spreadsheet multiple times. This test does not use an FPU.
FileMaker Pro
Using FileMaker Pro, we sorted a large database. This is a common task and can be very time-consuming.
Persuasion
We drew thumbnails of a large presentation. This task relies on QuickDraw, which runs native on Power Macs.
QuarkXPress
In this global-font-change test, QuarkXPress performed at speeds close to those on high-end Quadras.
Processor Floating Point Video Mix Disk Mix Word Excel Filemaker Pro Persuasion Quark Xpress
Macintosh LC III 9.95 137.74 9.94 10.21 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00 10.00