Brief Introduction
I built my game rig about 2 months back, and like all performance freaks, I wanted to see how well my new system stacked up against the competition. So I did a little research to see how everybody “in the industry” tested their game systems. Now before I get too much further, let me just say that there are about a million and one benchmark programs out there made by various developers that all measure various aspects of system performance. However, concerning game rigs all we really need to focus on is measuring the performance of our CPU and graphics sub systems. By measuring and combining these two through different testing methods, we derive our base and max 3D performance data.
Different Strokes for Different folks!
Now, the methods I’m about to describe are by no means the one and only industry standard staple of performance. What I did was just take some of the best and most common methods that nearly everyone uses in some way or another. By using common methods, we get more comparative results — more data. And this means we stand a better chance of finding out how we measure up.
Now some might think that benchmarking by home users is nothing more than a bunch of ego gratifying garbage. In fact, the opposite is true. For the most part, benchmarking has been misused my manufacturers that have rigged their machines, components, what-have-you, in order to appear to be higher in quality and better in performance. By home benchmarking, all we do is take the power back. We test and compare, and see where our machines stand and fall. In this way, we can even make more informed and smarter upgrade decisions having seen the results for ourselves — and not relying on what the marketing weenies want to tell us.
Benefits of Home Benchmarking
First of all, by getting results and comparing them to other setups, we get to see how “fast” (for lack of a better term) our systems are. Secondly, as I mentioned above, we can find similar setups and compare our results to see where we might be lacking. In this way, we can tweak here or there, or just upgrade if we’re way behind the power curve. However, benchmark results should be taken with a grain of salt. What I mean by this is that you shouldn’t just run out to the local rip off mart and drop 300 bucks on the latest video card just because you scored less in some performance test than Joe Blow down the street. This defeats the purpose. If you happen to achieve low scores, it’s not the end of the world. Ask yourself this, “Do I notice a performance lag while running my most common games/applications?” If the answer is no, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
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