How Well Does Windows XP Perform on a Mac?

Finally, Cnet has answered the question that's been bugging me for weeks: If I install Windows XP on a Macintosh (via one of the several methods to do it), how fast is it really going to run?

Daniel Begun benchmarked a Mac running Windows six ways from Sunday, using both major installation methods (Boot Camp and Parallels), and compared results (where possible) to the same programs running on the MacOS operating system.

The results are interesting, though they leave you begging for more:

A Photoshop image resize was much faster on XP (Boot Camp) than on the Mac, though Begun notes that Photoshop doesn't run natively on the Mac. Strange, though, because most people think of the Mac as the best platform for doing image manipulation. That may not actually be the case.

In both gaming and an iTunes encoding test, the Mac beat Windows on Boot Camp by a good 10 to 20 percent.

In every test, the Parallels Windows emulator (which runs on top of MacOS but lets you run Windows apps simultaneously as Mac apps, without a reboot), was much slower. But this is, of course, to be expected with an emulator. Still, if you want to see exactly how much slower, check the Cnet piece.

The Photoshop test is a tantalizing beginning. I'd love to see more general performance figures, especially a comparable test on Office applications and more graphics manipulations (maybe a video editing test, too?). How about it, Cnet?