How Do You Benchmark?

[Cmustang87]

I have a new system coming to me in the next week.

I was curious how [H]OCP and it's members is able to get good, accurate benchmarks of games that don't have it built in. The only thing I can think of doing is using the benchmark tool with FRAPS, but since you have to play the game, it's not entirely accurate. I wanted to get a before and after comparison of my FPS.

Thanks in advance.

 

[KILLER_K]

Big fan of the Heaven 4.0 Benchmark. Run it on the extreme presets. Don't forget to hit F9 to start the benchmark after it starts up.

 

[primetime]

Wouldn't it be so cool if hard ocp would put together a download package so we could all get the best apples to apples comparisons....but i guess theirs a lot more to it

 

[Cmustang87]

I use Heaven and other games with benchmarks that are included with games.

I was mostly curious how everyone benchmarks with Battlefield 3, Skyrim, etc with games that do not have benchmarks. Do you just use FRAPS and play on a map and use that as a basis?

 

[trick0502]

I play games using fraps. Bf3, fc3, tr, etc. the only time I use canned benchmarks is to test stability.

 

[ebduncan]

I use Heaven and other games with benchmarks that are included with games.

I was mostly curious how everyone benchmarks with Battlefield 3, Skyrim, etc with games that do not have benchmarks. Do you just use FRAPS and play on a map and use that as a basis?

Run fraps in games, log to file as low/average/max you can then graph the data in a program such as excel

I play games using fraps. Bf3, fc3, tr, etc. the only time I use canned benchmarks is to test stability.

BF3 is hard to test due to number of variables being different. You can test with online play which is vastly different than single player, at least in terms of the 64 player matches.

Normally, when I am tweaking settings, I am running 3dmark11 go for the highest score, then see if it pans out in games.

overall though best way to do it is just play the game, increase your settings until you find it unplayable, then drop back some.

 

[timmylol]

I usually just go straight into the game with fraps running and let it log. Or if it plays fine enough for me, I know it's fine.