The action and topological charge are used to determine the relative rates of standard cooling and smearing algorithms in pure SU(3)-color gauge theory. We consider representative gauge field configurations on 16^3 x 32 lattices at beta=5.70 and 24^3 x 36 lattices at beta=6.00. We find the relative rate of variation in the action and topological charge under various algorithms may be succinctly described in terms of simple formulae. The results are in accord with recent suggestions from fat-link perturbation theory.