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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HillBeast - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
Yeah, but the thing is, if WoW is working fine for you now and it is the only thing you run then why would you be looking at reviews? The point of the review is to show what it is a capable of and if you say wanted to know 'Will I be able to play Crysis because I'm getting bored of WoW?' you can see, yes I can, rather than 'I don't know but it sure as hell gets higher frames in WoW. I'm not trying to bash WoW but I'm 99% sure it is not good for benchmarking, especially seeing it has an FPS limit of like 160 or something. Most GPUs will reach that easily these days so all we'll get is 'The GTX 280 and the 9800GTX and the Radeon 5870 are all equally powerful because they got 160FPS in WoW'.Again, not bashing WoW. It's a fun game.
Exodite - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
I concur, please include some strategy and role-playing games as well.I know Guru 3D have been using Anno 1404 for testing and it taxed their rig decently enough on max settings. Something like Dragon Age might be interesting as well, certainly for me.
Civilization V is coming at the end of the year and that might be a good example of a turn-based strategy games that's bound to be popular.
I realize that strategy and role-playing games often tax the CPU more so than the GPU but modern incarnations do need a bit of both.
Indeed, WoW may not be a good benchmark despite having 12 million players but it would be a good idea to keep an eye out for up-and-coming MMOs. Whenever something that's actually viable is outed, that is. *sigh*
Obviously shooters are going to be the most popular ones still but I'd rather stick to no more than 2-3 different shooters and one game each from other popular genres than 5-6 shooters.
Targon - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
Dungeons and Dragons Online, as well as Lord of the Rings Online are two games that are popular enough to deserve some attention. With DirectX 10 support currently, and from an AMD press release, DirectX 11 support in 2010.My source on this(since some may not have heard):
http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-pre...">http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-pre...
The Free to Play really has saved DDO from being doomed to obscurity, even if it remained up for another ten years.
PrinceGaz - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
Different genres is the most important requirement imo.There should be at least one turn-based strategy (these tend to often require a very zoomed-out view of what is going on), one RTS (where you tend to focus on individual smaller units closer in), and one RPG with a mainly above view (where you are usually looking at a group of characters in individual rooms or caves etc). Each type of view has its own unique requirements. So that's three non-FPS games.
I'd add a further two simulation style games: one a flight type (either aircraft or spacecraft) where you're mainly looking at lots of distant objects except when landing or in combat, and one strictly ground level give or take the odd jump over a hill (probably driving but could be something like snowboarding). That makes for five non-FPS games.
Only once a good graphically-demanding representative of each of those genres has been chosen, should the rest of the list be filled with FPS titles, otherwise we'll end up with the usual "all FPS games except the odd one or two of some other genre thrown in if the author happens to like it".
kanabalize - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
maybe do some benchmark with software that uses this functionscodedivine - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
It used to be included in some Anandtech benchmarks and I request that it be reincluded. RPGs remain popular with the PC gaming crowd. Not only is this a good and fairly popular game, it is also a good test of GPUs as it still brings down many midrange GPUs to their knees.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
The plan is to include an RPG, so we'll see. RPGs are difficult to meaningfully benchmark, so it's not quite as easy as throwing in a FPS or RTS with a solid benchmark or replay mode.velis - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
Heh, I threw my 8800GTS 640MB out the window because I had slideshow in the swamp :)Fine game it is.
JonnyDough - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Mine overheats and gets a few anomolies in ATI tool and when I called EVGA they told me that it wasn't necessarily a sign of a bad card. Funny, my X1650XT doesn't do that...Ryan Smith - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link
I'm going to start off the comments here with one condition: no synthetic benchmarks. Our editorial policy continues to be that we only want to use real games, as synthetic benchmarks just encourage AMD and NVIDIA to focus on optimizing for something people can't play. So please don't bother asking for 3DMark.