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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CharonPDX - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
Since Microsoft has abandoned Flight Sim, I'd say move to X-Plane.Which can also provide cross-platform testing, since it's available on Windows, Linux, and OS X. (And it has built-in benchmarking.)
qnetjoe - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
Please include some professional applications like Solidworks, Pro/E, and maybe some FEA applications that use GPGPU.Urbanos - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
If its possible, to incorporate a notebook GPU to compare against desktop variants. ie one of the new i5 or i7 platforms with an nvidia card 9800GTS and 9600GT or whatever their refreshed smaller counterparts are.a couple older titles:
world of warcraft - latest to current patches
Oblivion - latest edition/patches
Team fortress 2
newer stuff: at typical res ie, 1280x1024, 1680x1050 & 1920x1200 or their widescreen alternatives
dawn of war 2 +expansion if necessary
Mass effect 2
Bad company 2
bioshock 2
supreme commander 2
having gpgpu stuff as a later project, seperate bench would be incredibly valuable
darkos - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
yes, Ok, I know it's 'old' but, it's the latest version of this game / simulator. I and many others still use this application, and would benefit from knowing what to expect with a given set of hardware. Also, since your site would be one of the few to include it, it would increase readership of your reviews.pehrs - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
Please, do a test with some older versions of Dx as well as atleast one OpenGL based game. I have been burned badly by drivers and cards that can't run run old games (8800 GTS can't mannage over 5 fps in a game using Dx7...).I am also very interested in more measurements of the sound levels outputted by the cards.
fshaharyar - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
How about trying out the Unigine HeavenThe Unigine engine is comparable to Epic's Unreal and id Software's Doom architectures. Unigine delivers for example DirectX 11 and Tessellation, one of the API's most important features. For DirectX 11 Tessellation polygons are dissected. Unigine currently has support for Open GL 3.2 as well. It supports hardware Tessallation , Screen Space Ambient Occulsion, Direct Compute and Shader Model 5.0.
If Tessalation active, diverse objects like walls or bricks are modeled with a multiple amount of their original number of polygons. This way furrows and bumps get "noticeable” physically. The result looks excellent and has an andvantage in contrast to Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) and similar techniques: It is affected by Anisotropic Filtering and Multisampling Anti Aliasing.
* For a fact to see the real potential of Direct X 11 cards On a Radeon HD 5870 in DX 11 mode the frames per second drop by 39 percent as soon as tessellation is activated. While a Radeon HD 5770 deals a little better with the additional work and drops only 31 percent.
T2k - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK Unigine engine powers zero games on the market so far which means under "No Synthetic Benchmarks Policy" the Heaven benchmark has no place in the basket.fshaharyar - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
a very good question posed by you T2K but if you want the relevance of unigine then just take look at thishttp://www.techpowerup.com/117934/NVIDIA_Claims_Up...">http://www.techpowerup.com/117934/NVIDI..._Hand_in...
this news will definitely revv things up
poohbear - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
Hey, i NEVER look at any of ur synthetic benchmarks, i like real world results.i currently like how u bench a variety of different types of games. Eg u have cpu centric RTS like Dawn of war 2 (which ofcourse is still very much reliant on a gpu, but it DOES see huge gains from different cpus as well) , Crysis is gpu centric FPS, and include some games that are famous for their multi-core & DX 10 support (farcry 2). With DX11, there's really only 2 FPS that are out: Stalker Call of pripyat, and AvP. I dont see it necessary to include UE3 games cause we all know they run like gravy on all hardware. Just my 2 cents.
- Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
I agree categorizing/rating games into their system stress levels ie system ‘stressability hogs' , or‘elegant resource users’, will give game developers as well as potential comp buyers useful information.asH