Another quickie today, folks. I’d like to draw your attention to a nifty tool for benchmarking your PC, by Passmark Software.
It’s not really all that difficult to determine if one graphics card(or PC, for that matter) has more power than another. In a lot of cases, you can simply look at how much video memory it’s got. Plus, it’s a safe bet that something by one of the specialized manufacturers is going to pack a bigger punch than some random on-board card. Unfortunately, power is only a small part of the bigger picture- you’ve also got to take into account power consumption, firmware, and any additional features one card might have packed into it could set it apart from another card on the market.
Of course, chances are good that you already know all of this. You’re aware that, if you’re really curious as to how the model you’ve got stacks up against it’s peers, you can take a look at this graphics card hierarchy chart, posted on Tom’s Hardware. You know that you can find a wealth of information on performance benchmarks on Passmark’s Video Card Benchmark Database.
But what if you’re looking to figure out exactly how your card- the one you’ve plugged in to your own system- measures up? What if you want to know how your unique operating environment affects your graphics power- and whether or not there’s anything you can do to improve things if the impact is negative?
Passmark’s PerformanceTest software’s just the ticket. You can use it to benchmark pretty much every aspect of your PC’s performance and compare your numbers to baseline systems that the software’s got in it’s database. In the event that your computer’s not necessarily performing as well as it should, you can use PerformanceTest to determine how the tweaks you’ve made have impacted your system’s power.
We’ll go over how to tweak your system’s performance settings in a later post.
Image Credits: [Infoflavour]
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