Designing Our Next GPU Test Suite

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• Zappcatt - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  Batman AA not taxing?
  Let me guess, you run AMD?
  
  I have a 9800GT SLI setup, and I get a minimum framerate of 1 if i enable Physx.
  
  Dark Void is similar, yes if you disable a major feature, it will fly, but if you want to see it "in all its glory" it can CRUSH current hardware.

• Mr Alpha - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  How about Metro 2033? From the screenshots I've seen it has some really fancy graphics. Might even give Crysis a run for its money as the king of graphics.

• krumme - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  Ryan, total respect for non syntetic bm, and even more respect for involving your customers. Lets have more of that. That means more to me, than the reviews themselves.
  
  Is the new methology going to be used for the fermi launch?
  
  If so:
  Dont you find it problematic? - and if, - how?
  You must know a lot speculated that you would alter your bm suite when fermi was comming. Controlling the anticipation like you do here, does not change that. Knowing we anticipated this situation, how do want us to interprete what is happening?
  
  I think we had the same problems with the intel ssd reviews, fortunately it ended with your own excellent bm suite, you made yourself, instead of the 4k random writes all over. Happy ending here. A great benefit for your customers. I hope your will get there to with your gfx suite.
  
  But changing it right now is highly problematic, because the comparison to earlier bm is weadk. I think Fermi should stand by itself, like the ssd should.

• Ryan Smith - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link

  Why now?
  
  My goal as GPU editor is to refresh our benchmark suite roughly every 6 months. It's been made very clear to us that you guys like to see new games used, and this gives us the opportunity to rotate those games in.
  
  This is a particularly critical point since our last refresh was for the Evergreen launch, which means we don't have any DX11 games in our suite. With NVIDIA soon to ship DX11 cards, we finally will be able to do some DX11 performance comparisons, so we're going to go ahead and refresh our suite.
  
  We're not going to throw everything out, and every card is going to have to "stand by itself".

• Earthmonger - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  I think I'd drop from the list:
  - Any game optimized for the console market, which is hardware limited.
  - Any MMO; games that rely on data transmission beyond the local machine are prone to too many variables to be considered a trustworthy test of performance.
  
  I'd like to see more serious simulation games, or RPGs with realistic environmental effects.

• LeeF - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  For GPU and CPU both. Bioshock 2 is the game that's inducing me to upgrade my computer, and it'd be nice to see an Unreal-engine game in your suite.
  
  I just beat Bioshock 1, and it was like playing Myst on my C2D E6750/Geforce GTS 250. It's the first game I've ever played on this machine that hasn't run silky smooth at 1920x1080. So I'm definitely waiting till I upgrade before I try the sequel.
  
  Also some Distributed Computing benchmarks like RC5-72 or Folding@Home might be nice, if you can find a release client that runs on both Steam and CUDA. Your site still has a bit of a DC crowd (though not nearly as much as Arstechnica, judging by your OGR-27 ranking) ;) , and it would also be a good indicator of GPGPU performance.

• samspqr - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  Hi
  
  You already use 3dsmax, cinebench and povray in your CPU reviews. I know that in older versions the GPU didn't make a difference for those rendering times, but that may have changed: could you check if GPU power makes any difference in the versions you're currently using? if they do, I definitely want to see those included
  
  (I know you're supposed to use quadros and firepros when working with these apps, but the apps themselves have changed, and it's not really necessary anymore)

• bdunosk - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  WoW... regardless of it being an older game built on older technology, the player base is gigantic. I'd wager that a lot of us wonder if that newly released GPU will make any difference during peak hours in the major cities or with all the settings cranked in a 25-man raid boss fight. Though I'll also state the obvious that from what I've been able to piece together, the game is much more CPU limited than GPU.

• samspqr - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  not everybody plays games
  
  actually, by your reasoning, they should only test Word: nearly everybody uses that
  

• samspqr - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  (forget it: now that I re-read it, I don't even understand your post)