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Performance Measurement

M

MISMCSA

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Sep 6, 2001
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I just purchased some new components, and I was curious what the preferred tool nowadays is to measure? Back when I was keeping up with latest and greatest, it was 3dMark 01. What do you all use now?

Thanks
 
For the GPU, games. Read reviews of the card you have and compare your framerate. For CPUs, programs like Cinebench, POV-Ray, WPrime, and of course Folding@Home.

If you find use in synthetic benchmarks, then you can use 3DMark Vantage. There will be a DX11 version released sometime soon too.
 
I still use 3DMark2001. (In combination with 3DMark2000, 3DMark03, 3DMark05, 3DMark06 and Aquamark3D.) I see no reason to give up on the old, just because there's something new around. How else can you compare the current equipment to what you had five or ten years ago?
(As a side note: It's often recommended to use the latest drivers for maximum performance, but I've found that new drivers every now and then actually degrade the performance of older functions. Example: A new graphics card is released. For the first six months or so the drivers are refined to acheive maximum performance with contemporary software. Then the performance curve flattens out considerably, and drivers released three years later are less optimised to run the (by now) "old" software contemporary with the card.)

Once I upgrade my computer from running XP and a GF7800GT to Win7 and a more modern graphics card I will include Vantage as well, since I've even got a legit license for the full version of that benchmark!
 
If you're wanting to benchmark a new DX11 video card there aren't a great deal of options at the moment, the Heaven benchmark is probably the best test so far for over the top tessellation.

Synthetic benchmarks are largely frowned upon now because of their inability to reproduce real world scenarios, they're too easy to "optimize" for and quite often don't use effects in a balanced way that a game might use them. For example the Heaven benchmark goes nuts on the tessellation if your video card supports it yet modern games that actually use tessellation like Dirt2 actually use it in subtle ways.

The accepted best way to "benchmark" new hardware is to simply play real world games with it, and compare. 3DMark has little use other than being a good technology demonstration of new features.
 
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