


More advanced gamers can use software such as Fraps or OCAT to manually benchmark performance of games that don’t have a built-in benchmark, but this will require more time, testing, and figuring out a repeatable testing scenario to avoid potential scene-to-scene variance.
BENCHMARK TESTS UPGRADE
As a bonus, if you upgrade your graphics card or other PC hardware, you can re-run the benchmark and you’ll know exactly what gains you’ve netted. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a favorite of mine because you can easily see the frames per second performance that you’re getting in each scene, giving you a good indication of how the game will run overall. The results overview from Shadow of the Tomb Raider‘s built-in benchmark. (Check out our GeForce RTX 3080 Ti review to see some common ones, or the list of games with built-in benchmarks at the always fantastic PC Gaming Wiki.) Thiago Trevisan/IDG The first order of business here is to make sure your graphics card can run without shutting down or displaying any weird graphical glitches, so you should allow it to run Heaven for at least 30 minutes, to allow the GPU to get up to temperature.Īnother very fun way to benchmark your GPU is to use the automated benchmarks built into many games. It’s free for personal use and runs a loop of a graphical environment that really utilizes your GPU. The first program we’re going to use is Unigine Heaven 4.0. That can mean a dead card, but in many cases you’ll get what are called “artifacts”-basically imperfections on the image, flickering, or even pulsating colors. It’s rare, but sometimes a graphics card can be defective from the factory. Now that you know why you should benchmark, it’s time to get into the how. To check for stability and other vitals like thermals, clock speeds, etc.įirst, test for stability and temperatures Thiago Trevisan/IDG.How much performance will you gain by buying a new graphics card? Now you’ll know! To be able to compare your current PC’s performance against your future hardware upgrades.To get a baseline performance metric so that you know if your GPU is performing as it should by comparing to other standard results.
