PCMark 8: Real Apps Deliver Relevant Results

What makes PCMark 8 different from other benchmarks? Real-world relevance.

With PCMark 8 you measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. We've grouped these tasks into scenarios that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.

This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be clear to you and other end users.

Adobe Creative Cloud and Creative Suite 

Adobe Creative Cloud is a subscription service that gives users access to leading software applications for graphic design, video editing, web development, and photography. Adobe Creative Suite applications, purchased outright, are no longer sold by Adobe. 

The PCMark 8 Applications benchmark includes tests using four of the most popular and widely used applications: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop. You must have the relevant programs installed in order to run the benchmark. PCMark 8 is compatible with Adobe Creative Suite 6, and all CC versions of Adobe Creative Cloud desktop applications.

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play a huge number of media formats. FFmpeg is used in popular programs such as Blender, Google Chrome, VLC, XBMC and many others.

FFmpeg is used for the Video Editing workload in the PCMark 8 Creative benchmark.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a free and open-source software suite to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images. Freely available since the early 1990s, it has consistently been one of the most comprehensive free image processing packages available. Today, it is used to support thousands of commercial web sites and is used in professional digital image and movie studios as well as publishing shops. It is also a component of a number of commercial applications. 

ImageMagick is used in the Photo Editing and Batch Photo Editing tests that form part of the Home and Creative benchmark tests in PCMark 8.

Internet Explorer

The Home, Work and Creative benchmarks in PCMark all include tests for measuring a system's ability to render and process web pages. The tests use Internet Explorer to render web pages in a window. The web server is a local server built into the test.

LibreOffice Calc

LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite, developed by The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is used by an estimated 80-100 million users worldwide, around 40 percent of which are corporate uses. Larger customers include the French government with 500,000 PCs and Comunitat Valenciana with 120,000 PCs. The City of Munich, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and the Copenhagen Hospital System all use LibreOffice on tens of thousands of PCs.

One of the key productivity applications in LibreOffice is Calc, a spreadsheet application. Spreadsheet apps normally rely on the CPU, however, when a sheet has more than a hundred rows of data, the GPU can start to help. With compatible hardware, Calc uses OpenCL to perform some of the work on the GPU, giving improved performance. 

Calc is used in the PCMark 8 Work benchmark test. You can choose whether to use OpenCL acceleration or not with the Accelerated and Conventional test options. 

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a suite of office applications used by over a billion people worldwide. Office 365 is a subscription-based online service which offers access to various services and software built around the Microsoft Office platform.

The PCMark 8 Applications benchmark includes tests using Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Word. You must have the relevant programs installed in order to run the benchmark. PCMark 8 is compatible with Microsoft Office 2010, Office 2013 and Office 365 applications.

About PCMark 8

PCMark 8 is a complete benchmarking solution for business, enterprise, government, and other professional users. PCMark provides procurement departments, supply chain managers, and IT departments with accurate and impartial benchmarks for specifying and comparing the performance of Windows PCs, notebooks, and tablets.

PCMark benchmarks are developed in close cooperation with the world’s leading technology companies including AMD, Compal, Condusiv Technologies, Dell, HGST, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Quanta Computer, SanDisk Corporation, Seagate Technology, and Western Digital Corporation. Futuremark is an independently owned company developing benchmarking software to a strict code of neutrality.

Business, government and other commercial users can buy PCMark 8 Professional Edition direct from our website. Companies and organisations interested in site licenses for PCMark 8 and other Futuremark benchmarks should call Oliver Baltuch on +1-408-614-2025 (PST) or email sales@futuremark.com.

Individuals and other non-commercial users should buy PCMark 8 Advanced Edition or download PCMark 8 Basic Edition.