Earlier this Last year, in June, Don Meltz wrote an interesting blog “ArcGIS vs QGIS Clipping Contest Rematch” where he let compete ArcGIS and Quantum GIS in a clipping contest. The benchmark contest data set in question is a 878MB ZIP file (ContourClipTest.zip with the (guessed) EPSG Code 2260 – NAD83 / New York East (ftUS)). The blog page gained a lot of comments, even from ESRI since some ArcGIS versions crashed on this test data set.
Find below the various timings compiled from the blog and the comments:
Proprietary software
| Software | Processing time | Hardware/Software |
| ArcGIS 9.3 | crash after 1h 9min: ERROR 999999: Error executing function. Invalid Topology [4gb file limit.] Failed to execute (Clip) | unknown |
| ArcGIS 10.0 | crash likewise | unknown |
| ArcGIS 10.1 | ESRI promise to calculate it in 34 seconds in this updated version (did anyone test?) | unknown |
| GlobalMapper (version?) | 30 mins | unknown |
| GlobalMapper v11.02 | 49 sec | Windows XP w/ 3.5GB RAM |
| Manifold 8 (64bit) | 31 min | Windows XP64 16 gb. RAM and 2.33 GHz |
Note: The two GlobalMapper results are a bit funny, perhaps always minutes?
Free and Open Source Software
| Software | Processing time | Hardware/Software |
| Quantum GIS (version?; Simple features) | 4-5 min | unknown |
| GRASS GIS 7 (topological GIS) | 5 min | Dell PowerEdge 2950 from 2008, Intel Xeon 2.66GHz, 8GB RAM |
| gvSIG | to be done | |
| PostGIS | to be done |
Notes: Hope volunteers will test this also on gvSIG and PostGIS (and other FOSSGIS)! Please report…