Need a good benchmark

[BiG_Weasel]

Hi, guys!

I'm looking for a good, honest benchmark for my PC. I'm wanting to see what's really running out of date for today's games and such. I've tried Futuremark's products, but they seem a bit skewed toward what games will be doing in a few years, as all the games I currently have run fine, but their demos really whip my PC's behind. On 3DMark '05, I only got 2k points or so, and 9k in 3DMark01 I got +9k points. I don't think they're really real-world honest.

I read an article here a while back and tried some of the benchmarks mentioned, but I found them to be lacking. Any other ideas? Thanks!

[Panama Red]

Guess I'm confused about what you are after. My understanding of Benchmarking is that you use it to compare the performance of your hardware to others in a common data base. Helps you determine if your equipment is performing up to design spec. Second, it establishes a base line number that you can use periodically to determine if your hardware is degrading or if the addition of new hardware improves performance measureably. Some try to use benchmarks as a competition to see who can generate the biggest numbers but that's just child's play for me and serves no purpose but to provide bragging rights.

[ror_b211]

Those are odd benchmark results anyway - If you got 9000 in 3d mark 2001SE you should have got only about 500 in 3dmark05. Not many people even with high specs use 3d Mark 2005 that much yet, because its designed more for the future. At present 3d Mark 2003 or aquamark3 should give you the most 'honest' benchmark, since they're suited to today's systems.

[BiG_Weasel]

made a mistake in my first post. the 2k score was in 3DMark03

Also, what I'm looking for is a "realistic" view of my PC. 3DMark is good and all, but I know that my PC runs games just fine, and I want to see a real-world example of how it stacks up to other PCs. It seems like 3DMark tries too hard to cram a bunch of useless tests into a benchmark that shows things that NO game out there is doing right now. I want to be current....not 3 years ahead.

[ror_b211]

err...ok well 3dMark/AquaMark tests all aspects of your PC's graphics capability, so its designed to be very accurate, thats why some of the tests are strange (like the horse testing point sprites and what appears to be a rotating dog turd testing bump mapping on 3d Mark 2001). Another way to benchmark is to take average FPS on games, the best program to use is called FRAPS (http://www.fraps.com/).