Generally, web application performance depends on the technology used for their development, browser type, operating system and more. There are many methods available to test the overall performance parameters for an entire web application as well as for the individual components.

From the point of view of UI runtime rendering systems, GUIMark is a new benchmark tool meant to provide data that shows the influencing factors over the rendering engine speed. GUIMark is similar to yet another benchmark tool, Bubblemark.

While Bubblemark allows a comparison between performance levels in case of RIA frameworks in various web browsers, GUIMark shows the possibility to obtain complex user interfaces that support animation for a maximum draw rate of 60 frames per second.

Regarding the differences between the two mentioned benchmarking tools, the GUIMark author stated: "GUIMark takes a different approach by trying to benchmark the types of UI elements common in our Web 2.0 world. This includes things like vector redraws, alpha transparencies, text reflow, bitmap motion, and 9 scale slicing rules. From there I just fill up the render pipeline until it becomes so over-saturated that it becomes easy to visually distinguish which rendering engines are more efficient than others. As a result, the benchmark is more complicated on a visual level and requires a bit more time than Bubblemark to understand the implementation rules."

The rendering tests were performed on a Macbook Pro for two different operating systems (Mac OS X Leopard and Windows XP) and various technologies (DHTML, Flash, JAVA and Silverlight). The results are presented here and allow you to compare the average frame rate values expressed in FPS - in case of Windows XP operating system the average frame rate values are higher than those corresponding to the test results shown on Mac OS.

The GUIMark implementations in HTML, Flex 3, Java 5 Swing, Silverlight 1 / Javascript, Silverlight 2 Beta / C# are available for download.