This page used to document benchmark results which compared GraphicsMagick 1.3.8 performance to ImageMagick 6.5.8-10 performance. We found that GraphicsMagick was usually considerably faster at executing image processing operations from the command line than ImageMagick 6.5.8-10 was. One ImageMagick algorithm ran as much as 770 times slower. GraphicsMagick clearly ran much more efficiently under Microsoft Windows.

We now find that a simple head to head performance comparison between GraphicsMagick and recent ImageMagick is no longer possible because ImageMagick has changed the meanings of the existing arguments. In particular, we discovered that ImageMagick filter arguments producing convolution matrices are now producing lower-order convolution matrices representing perhaps an order of magnitude less work given the same arguments. The resulting images are visually substantially less filtered. Using the same command-line filter arguments causes GraphicsMagick to appear slower when it is actually doing far more work than ImageMagick.

Due to it not being feasable to do a head to head performance measurement between GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick, we have decided to not post results at the moment. However, the strategy and a simple benchmark driver script are still provided for those who want to do their own performance comparisons between GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick.