Current seismic design philosophy is changing from ‘safety’ to ‘performance’. The philosophy of the performance-based seismic design has also been implied in the newly updated seismic design code of China [1]. Nevertheless, its engineering application will depend on simplified methods for engineers to acquire the structural inelastic seismic response. The capacity spectrum method (CSM) based on the pushover analysis is one of the approximate approaches. In this paper, three improved CSMs proposed by Chopra and one substitute method suggested by the authors are used to evaluate the seismic performance of three types of building structures, which have same plane design but different column shapes - rectangular column frame, special-shaped column frame and short-leg shear wall structure, respectively. The results obtained are also compared with those of the inelastic dynamic analysis. In this way, the practicability and reliability of four simplified methods are checked and evaluated.