zs3.me

zBenchmark Qt app

Revision 8
© 2021, 2024, 2026 by Zack Smith. All rights reserved.

About my general purpose benchmark

zBenchmark is a general purpose benchmark that I wrote in C++ and which uses the Qt 6 library to provide a GUI.

I intended it to mainly run on Linux but, because both C++ and Qt are platform-agnostic, it could potentially run on Windows and MacOS as well.

I wrote the assembly language code for memory bandwidth measurements that requires the Unix ABI (application binary interface), so Windows at least will fall back on C code for that.

A single combined score

zBenchmark provides a single combined score to indicate the overall performance of your system, which is simply a sum of all the individual scores from the tests it performs.

The standard against which your system is compared, and which naturally has score of 1.0, is the dual-core Core i5 4278U that if found in the 2014 Macbook Pro running 64-bit Debian at 3.1 GHz (CPU governor: performance).

What tests does it perform?

Currently zBenchmark measures the performance of each of the following:

Test Underlying code
AES encryption/decryption openssl
Audio compression lame generating mp3
Big number floating-point math bc
C code compilation clang
CPU raytracing POVray
Disk read/write speed C++
Fibonacci with 1-megabit numbers C++ and asm
File compression gzip, bzip2, zip, 7z
Floating-point tests C++
Image manipulation QImage
Memory bandwidth C++ and asm
Object detection Python
Prime number generation C++ and asm
SHA-2 hashing openssl
Text to speech Python
Video encoding ffmpeg producing h264/mp4

Download

zBenchmark 0.35

To compile it:

  • Run ./configure
  • Run ./install.sh
  • Finally ./zBenchmark

Results

The reference system was previously the Raspberry Pi 4b however I sold mine, so for 0.35 the reference is the 2014 Macbook Pro, which has a Core i5-4278U and 8GB of DDR3L-1600 dynamic RAM.

System Processor RAM SSD Result
13 Macbook Pro 2014 Core i5-4278U 8GB DDR3L-1600 AppleSSD 1.0

Screenshots

Memory bandwidth

 393

System information

 340

iOS

I wrote a very similar benchmark app of the same name for iOS and it is in the App Store here.

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