About gaming hardware benchmarks
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2012 1:57 pm
We've had some discussions on this forum about pc gaming hardware, what's good, what's bad, and how you tell the difference.
In particular, things like CPU's, memory and graphics cards have been tricky to really evaluate, because the statistics various benchmarking sites post don't reveal the full picture.
Often the numbers they put up give you some measure of how you can compare hardware to other hardware of the same category, but usually, that's about it. You get some idea of what's best, but you can't really ever tell if something is "good enough" - and so, it becomes very hard to determine whether a specific piece of hardware is worth the additional cost compared to the alternatives.
Fortunately, hardware reviewers have become privvy to this. A specific site I just came upon directly addresses the usefulness of benchmarks, and attempts to come up with a better benchmark for pc hardware gaming setups.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/1
I figured that, with a bunch of hardware interested nerds hanging around here, it would be worthwhile to put it up, and see what you all think about their scheme: Measuring how long it 'usually' takes to render frames, and looking at how common and how bad the slowest rendering times are.
In particular, things like CPU's, memory and graphics cards have been tricky to really evaluate, because the statistics various benchmarking sites post don't reveal the full picture.
Often the numbers they put up give you some measure of how you can compare hardware to other hardware of the same category, but usually, that's about it. You get some idea of what's best, but you can't really ever tell if something is "good enough" - and so, it becomes very hard to determine whether a specific piece of hardware is worth the additional cost compared to the alternatives.
Fortunately, hardware reviewers have become privvy to this. A specific site I just came upon directly addresses the usefulness of benchmarks, and attempts to come up with a better benchmark for pc hardware gaming setups.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/1
I figured that, with a bunch of hardware interested nerds hanging around here, it would be worthwhile to put it up, and see what you all think about their scheme: Measuring how long it 'usually' takes to render frames, and looking at how common and how bad the slowest rendering times are.