Good well rounded video benchmarks

[Staples]

I am not sure about the nvidia scene but whenever a new ATI driver comes out, there are tons of people clamoring to the forums wanting to see if this one has any performance gain over the last one. The thing is that people here are too lazy to actually run benchmarks so 5 pages are easily posted and zero benchmarks.

Maybe someone (like me) can put an end to that however I want to know what games and utilities actually have easy and good video benchmarks in them. Say what you want about 3DMark, it is the easiest benchmark that I know of and it is free so when testing my machine, I still rely heavily on 3DMark 06.

I'd like to know if there are any other reasonable benchmarks (in games or otherwise) that do not make you jump through a bunch of hoops to actually extract the data (like using FRAPS because the game does not actually have a benchmark feature). Fancy is nice but I thought the Q3 benchmark was just fine and that one was simple and not in depth at all.

 

[guney]

I know for a fact that Crysis has a set of batch files that are placed under its program folder as part of the default installation that runs benchmarks. If you have Crysis installed, all you need to do is double-click on one of those. The game starts, does a given number of repetitions of a scripted loop (using your current game settings), and displays min/max/average frame rate numbers when it's done. There's one file for "GPU" benchmarking, and a separate one for "CPU" that uses a supposedly more CPU-heavy game loop (with more explosions, flying debris, thrown objects, etc.).

Another one I know of is for Crysis Warhead. There's a free benchmarking tool available on the Internet for this game. It's essentially a GUI front-end to the game's existing command-line benchmarking options. You install the game, you install the tool, you run the tool, and it does the same thing as what I described in the previous paragraph.

 

[Jhalf]

far cry 2

 

[MamaBoard]

far cry 2 is lame

 

[bigdogchris]

I think one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people upgrade to newer drivers but they don't even have to. Drivers only fix issues, compatibility and add features. If there are no new features, no fixes for your games/card and no compatibility issues, there's no reason to upgrade. I've upgraded drivers just to find out that the system performs worse than before.

Read the change/fix log before deciding to upgrade. I run the lean Vista default drivers also.

 

[Technophobe]

Here is a list of programs that I use that have some sort of GPU FPS testing / benchmark score:
3DMark
ATI Tool
Furmark
Aquamark
Rthdribl
Freestone Video Card Stability Test

Some are getting a bit old now and I don't think will get updated again. There are also the nVidia demos and Unigine demos and I think even nTune has a stability test (not totally sure).

I bet there is a lot more out there too... Even though 3DMark gets rubbished sometimes, it still seems to be the most popular to compare with.

From what I can see all the high end games (Crysis etc.) need you to buy the game first before running their demo, wouldn't it make more sense to have these as free downloads to entice people to buy the game after they see how good the demos are???