Certainly not a rigorous bench test, however it is a comparison of three Second Life viewers. The standard viewer, the release candidate, and the newly released Snowglobe.

We used the same avatar, standing at the same location, within 10 minutes, with bandwidth and all graphics set to the max, plus 2x anti-aliasing and spun continuously for about 20 seconds to obtain average readings of frames per second and CPU performance. We logged in twice with each viewer and here is what we found.

Standard viewer -
FPS: 15 | CPU: 47%

Release candidate -
FPS: 16 | CPU: 89%

Snowglobe -
FPS: 15 | CPU: 67%

All viewers were the latest ones as of this post.

All of us on the iliveisl team use the release candidate because it seems to have better land tools. However, after this informal test, we may be switching to the normal viewer!

martinis during a pseudo-benchmark test? why, certainly!