Benchmarking

[gtechie]

I've been reading the articles at anandtech for a long time now and I've always wondered how you benchmark games, audio compression, and file reading/writing/etc. I've used 3DMark, SiSoftware, and someone even mentioned a program called Everest or something like that but how do you benchmark, for example, Battlefield 2? How does anandtech get the numbers for that and Photoshop benchmarking numbers? The last article for the Asus motherboard did benchmarking for iTunes, how do you get benchmarking results from that as well? I surely hope they don't use a stop watch for that, lol.

Any tips, hints, software that were used, would be great.

Thanks!
George

 

[robisbell]

a handy tool to have is PC Wizard you can get it at http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php
it can help you to monitor your hardware, software and benchmark.

 

[seemingly random]

PC Wizard shows a lot of useful system info - much of what cpuz shows - but the benchmark leaves a lot to be desired.

Of the free ones I like CrystalMark. There are many others but no best one that I've found.

 

[gtechie]

Thanks for the replies and those seem like standard benchmark tools like most others. But, how do you benchmark games, like Battlefield 2 for example? I haven't fully tried any of those you guys have mentioned but can they be used to do this?

Basically, I just got into the Gaming PC Industry and I'm training up to be the computer engineer. It's a new position and so no one has done this type of job here before but business is expanding and I will be evaluating new product samples and so forth from vendors. We have in-house 3DMark01-06/PCMark05 but for a true benchmark for our industry, I would like to figure out how to benchmark games with different hardware configurations and so forth, like Anandtech does.

 

[robisbell]

in any game you want it to be balanced. PC wizard allows you to see how balanced the hardware is. games benchmarks can change f you swap one part out, so there's no real good way to determine stability unless you have access to all the current memory, motherboards, video cards, psu's, hard drives, etc...

 

[gtechie]

Actually, I will have access to all of the parts we currently put into our gaming machines. So, for example, if I'm benchmarking a new sample video card from nVidia, I'll be using the latest hardware we currently use. Benchmark with our current video cards, pop in the sample video card, and get numbers for the new one and compare it to our current line-up. Basically, I will be able to benchmark new products like Anandtech but actually benching with Games, Photoshop, and even iTunes eludes me on how Anandtech gets their figures.

I just saw another benchmarking tool called AquaMark that supposedly benches using a real game engine, and so forth. Any thoughts or have any of you tried this one?

 

[robisbell]

but what about all the different hardware people will have, sound smore like you're in a pc branded manufacturing business than a video game developer.

I like using aquamark, it's a good way to stress test a video card.

 

[gtechie]

Actually, we are in a pc branded manufacturing but our brand is geared towards gaming pc's only. We don't build just regular old pc's like dell or hp. We build gaming pc's only. Sorry, when I said Gaming PC Industry earlier, it only meant PC Manufacturing built for gaming, not game development.

Anyway's, thanks for the reply. I'll look into using aquamark in addition to 3DMark but I was actually hoping for someone from Anandtech themselves on how they get benchmark numbers on games.

 

[robisbell]

I'd also use PC Wizard too, since it's benchmark works like 3DMark.