It's best used on older titles, that use Direct3D 10 or earlier, but given that Afterburner covers this, too, as well as the latest games, it's probably only worth using this, if nothing else works. The former is a comprehensive tool for adjusting the clock speeds and voltages of graphics cards, and works on AMD and Nvidia models it can also display this information, along with temperatures and frame rates, in an overlay when playing games (all of this data can be logged, for later analysis).įRAPS can also display and log frame rate, as well as capture video output and take screenshots, but it hasn't been updated since 2014. For Windows systems, MSI's Afterburner and FRAPS, are two of the most popular. There's a reasonable number of programs, all freely available, that can be used to record how quickly a 3D game is being processed. On the other hand, if you want to test what the PC is doing when its going through real workload, then you're better off logging data in the game itself – and for that, you need to use the right tool for the job. If you just want something to quickly check out your system with, though, these kind of tests and the numbers they collect are good enough. The background processing of input variables, path finding, audio tracks, and so on will be missing, and the rendering might not have things like explosions or other particle effects, which can often bring a graphics card down to its silicon knees. might not be indicative of what you might see during actual gameplay. If the results can be viewed in a graph, then this is easy to see, but if all you get are the numbers, then the figures themselves are near useless.Īnother potential issue with using a built-in test, is that the workload placed on the CPU, GPU, etc. Absolute values might only occur for a single frame or that figure might be hit multiple times, at regular intervals. There's some basic statistics, too, with the average (the arithmetic mean) and the absolute maximum/minimum figures shown.įor games with benchmark modes, or ones that can display frame rates while playing, the simplicity of these statistics is the first problem with using such features in games. In the above image, we can see 3 graphs: the frame rate, how long it took the CPU to process each frame for rendering, and the time it took for the GPU to work through a frame. Tweak, test, and check – it's all in the game In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, for example, the tool is advanced enough that results can be compared to a previous run, so you can easily see what impact any changes to hardware or the game's settings have produced. Ubisoft's latest titles in their popular franchises can run a set test, and then display the results in quite a lot of detail. Quite a few titles also have their own built-in test mode. We don't buy $2,000 machines just for them to run testing programs all day long (well, most of us don't).īut if you have a bunch of games installed on your system, you can easily use them instead – the latest titles often push the CPU and the GPU to their absolute limits of what they can do, so they give your system just as good a workout as any benchmark program. But as good as these programs are, they're ultimately an artificial setup: we don't play benchmarks. When we took a look at 20 programs to analyze and benchmark your hardware, some of those that specifically test 3D graphics performance provide in-depth charts for the performance and offer monitoring tools to log how the various parts are operating. Time to get a-testin'! It's more than just a game We'll cover the best way to go about collecting the data and how to use the tools that we run with to check out the latest hardware. In this article, we'll explain how you can use games to benchmark your PC and what you can do to analyze the results – either to check the overall performance or to see what part of your computer is doing most of the work. It's a perfect recipe for diving into the workings of a PC and seeing how well it performs. So how about combining all three? Take the computer know-how, the love of games, and the interest in components, and mix them all together. You may well have lots of experience of building and configuring computer systems, as PC gamers are often knowledgeable and enthusiastic when it comes to hardware. Like millions of people around the world, you probably use your PC to play video games.
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