Whats a good game to benchmark with?

[Fhistleb]

I'm just curious, I see alot of builds wanting to run StarCraft 2. I'm just wondering if there is something that would better test any new build out there.

 

[mfenn]

SC2 isn't really that good of a general gaming benchmark since it doesn't actually scale that well. Realistically, you're going to want to use a suite of games (Crysis, Dragon Age, MW2, LFD2, DoW II, Metro 2033, SC2, etc.). However, it is a really good benchmark of the system's ability to play SC2. 😛

 

[Athadeus]

Starcraft 2 seems to scale well in the couple benchmarks I've looked at, and in my personal experience with hundreds of hours of playing on 3 computers. I would say the GPU scaling isn't as good as the CPU scaling, but I wouldn't say either is particularly bad.

I had the misconception that there was a free Crysis benchmark tool and I was hoping to run that on my newest PCs 🙁 I should really read some reviews before I go and buy these new games expecting them to look great and be enough fun for the money.

 

[mfenn]

Starcraft 2 seems to scale well in the couple benchmarks I've looked at, and in my personal experience with hundreds of hours of playing on 3 computers. I would say the GPU scaling isn't as good as the CPU scaling, but I wouldn't say either is particularly bad.

Note that scaling is not the same as "runs well on anything". A game that "scales well" will run 5 times faster on a GPU/CPU that is 5 times more powerful. This is very important in a benchmark. Starcraft does a very good job at running well on low-end hardware, but it seems that they made some sacrifices that don't allow it to really stretch it's legs at the high end.

Seems pretty CPU-limited to me at the top, but the bottom is pretty poor scaling.

As for CPU, it scales alright with clock speed, but not worth crap for core count.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

Lots of games. Crysis, Metro, Stalker series, Just Cause 2, Any of the Call of Duty series and spin offs (BC2), etc.

And on the note about StarCraft2, it's actually heavily benchmarked because a lot of people want highest settings possible and want it to be able to keep the frames up even under heavy, heavy stress. The GPU is not the stress point in SC2, it's the CPU generally. So if you want to see if your Quad/Hex build can handle high end SC2 battles without dropping below, say, 30FPS or the grail of 60FPS, that's something to test. It's highly tested because it's a competitive game, so people build machines around never dropping below 60FPS for example.

Very best,