Designing Our Next GPU Test Suite
by Ryan Smith on March 14, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Ryan's Ramblings
In keeping with our desire to refresh our GPU test suite periodically, we’re going to be redoing our GPU test suite to rotate in some more modern games, along with rotating in some DirectX11 games capable of taking advantage of this generation of GPU’s full capabilities. And while we already have a pretty solid idea of what we’re going to run, we wanted to throw out this question anyhow and see what responses we get.
What games would you like to see in our next GPU test suite, and why?
What we’d like to see is whether our choices line up with what our readers would like to see. We can’t promise that we’ll act on any specific responses, but we have our eyes and ears open to well-reasoned suggestions. So let us know what you think by commenting below.
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philosofa - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
Good going on the no synthetics policy. I'd suggest BC2 as it's a popular DX11 (ish) game with high demands, Empire: Total War or Napoleon as it's also a fairly demanding game but isn't an FPS.I would suggest more but I'm too knackered to put together another coherent sentence... night :)
tomppi - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
Bring back Age of Conan please?TonkaTuff - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
There needs to be at least one game that can be utilised to research back through old benchmarks of GPU's for "historical" purposes.I like being able to see improvements in generations, eg. 8800gt to gtx 280.
I think Crysis fits the bill nicely and will continue to for another 12 months. It is still capable of bringing the latest cards to there knees at high res, high detail also
My only other recommendation would be Battlefield, Bad Company 2 as your modern fps game. Quite demanding on the video card compared to some other cough (mw2) console ports that a PC can punch out at over a 100 frames on high without breaking a sweat.
NA1NSXR - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
Ideally, I'd like to see the best selling title of every major engine on the market and also keep the synthetics. I want to know why certain cards are strong in some applications and I also want to see how chip design translates into raw computing power in different ways.moozoo - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
Ideally a graph over time of fps for the different cards while playing real games.My impression is the Nvidia Fermi is a grunt that give solid performance under all kinds of tough conditions (i.e. higher minimum frame rates)
and that AMD cards can sprint faster on less demanding scenes (higher maximum frame rate).
Personally higher minimum frame rates matter more to me. A detailed pros and cons article needs to be written and benchmarks need to give useful information about this for it to be valued.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
The big problem with minimum framerates is that they can often be inconsistent. Unlike averages that neatly average out any quirks, minimums quite often can vary for no good reason, which is a problem given that we shoot for consistency and repeatability here.For the games we have that do support minimums, I'm going to vet our results and see if it's consistent enough to meet our standards.
Headfoot - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
Empire Total War: Heavy on both Cpu and Gpu, can easily become more difficult with larger battles.Battlefield Bad Company 2: Popular, DX11, challenging.
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I would also love to see an increased focus on minimum frame rats. If a the minimum is low or the performance is very up and down it seems very choppy. I'd like to know if a card gives consistent performance rather than high averages.
kriztophr - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
I'd like to see a return to more tweaking of graphical settings to achieve better framerates, in addition to the preset choices.For example, just how big of a performance impact using AA or a certain effect is on the tested GPUs, and perhaps a rollover screenshot to show the difference in image quality.
GeorgeH - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
These aren't game requests, but:1) I would like to see one Eyefinity/NV MM dedicated benchmark geared towards a 3-display ~1920x1200 setup, and not just a dismissive "if you have the money for 3 monitors just buy a 5970 or GTX480 SLI" comment. I don't have a specific title in mind, I'd just like one that both actually works and for which you take "standard" benchmarks to make extrapolation to untested titles easier.
2) I would like to see an OpenCL benchmark (or whatever GPGPU library is most applicable/relevant.) Nothing fancy, I'd just like something from which to get a general idea of where things are as we move towards shifting FP to the GPU.
Brandonr87 - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
I'd love it if you guys did an After Effects bench. (It can utilize OpenGL with graphics cards, although I don't think it works with cf or sli)But yea, definitely would love to see an After Effects benchmark because I use it very often but can't figure out what would help me the most.