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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tuskers - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
I'm in full agreement with point 1, but I think you're actually wrong about point 2. WoW is plenty graphically demanding. While the "core game" might be 5-6 years old, the graphics have been refreshed with each expansion-- while the engine is aging, lots of new effects are added all the time.While individual spell casts aren't that graphically intensive, a raid will often have more textures on-screen than anything. While an individual player model isn't the most complex, you're scaling it to cover 25-50 models at any one time with multiple textures, and that's before the environment. It's different, yes, but the load itself isn't small at all.
mountaingoat - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
I would be curious to read about the trade-offs, and see the performance of using the (cheaper) gaming GPUs for modeling and simulation software, SolidWorks for example.Pessimism - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
some have been mentioned, i will add a second vote:-frugal gamer resolutions (1366x768 covers bottom-end LCD monitors and gamers using cheap/previous-gen 720P LCD TVs as giant monitors).
-GPGPU: CUDA, OpenCL etc.
-Flash-based video playback acceleration
-2D GUI performance: Win XP, Vista/7 w/aero disabled, Vista/7 w/aero enabled,
-2D flash game performance
Twsmit - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
Please bench at resolutions the majority of us play with. Most monitors are 1680x1050, 1920x1200, 1920x1080. How many people really have 30" monitors or triple eyefinity setups? I think super high res is great as a bonus to an article, but please continue to focus on what the rest of us have and can afford.I also wouldn't find focusing on the best bang for the buck CPU. For example the i7 920 stock speed, or an affordable stock clocked i5 cpu.
CaptNKILL - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
The most important thing to me, regardless of the game is that the card I'm reading about is achieving playable frame rates. For example, a lot of sites these days like to run all of their games at 2560x1600 with 4xAA minimum, even if this puts the average framerates in the 20s or 30s in some games.Its a waste of time to even read that benchmark because I'd never play a game with such terrible performance, especially on cutting edge hardware. It doesn't matter how high the settings are or how awesome the graphics card is, if the performance is not playable, scrap the benchmark and lower the settings until the results become useful. A simple note of "2560x1600 with 16xAA was not playable in this game on any cards tested" will suffice.
Anandtech doesn't usually have this problem anyway though.
pjladyfox - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
After looking at your criteria here are a few that would be good:Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - FPS - DX11 title
Dirt 2 - Racing - DX11 title
Dawn of War II - RTS - DX10 title
This gives a nice spread of different titles for each genre as well as those that support DX10/11 under Vista and/or Win7 which will be important as NVIDIA launches their DX11 hardware. In the case of Dirt 2 it's already got a built-in benchmarking tool which should also make things a bit easier I would imagine.
vshah - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
I'd be happy with one or two games based on each major engine. source / tech5 / cryengine / whatever else is being used.Luminair - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
It will be easy to forget DX10. I don't like it, but I think you need to verify that it works.Consider continuing to use World in Conflict as the Direct X 10 benchmark. It might provide the best diagnostics of a DX10 game.
SydneyBlue120d - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
Just some examples:- Flash -> Youtube, Vimeo, Hulu, Farmville;
- Silverlight;
- HD Video Files made via modern camcorder;
- Once they become available, Direct2D apps (e.g. IE9, FF4) especially running HTML 5;
- OpenCL apps once they become available;
I will also add to the review a very old low budget machine, I mean something with the first PCIE 16x slot, to see if chaningh the GPU cold be productive in similar enviroment (and Yes, I understand a person with a P4 631 will not buy a Fermi 480, but maybe a passive 5450 may be a good upgrade wih an old SIS chipset (as you can find in many Lenovo e.g.).
Negative Energy - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link
My reasoning is that EVE is one of the online games with the most players, and it has some of the best graphics for online games. It is not a DX11 game, yet, but you often get the situation where the player has 2 or more screens with multiple games running on them at high resolution.Mass Effect 2 would also be nice.