Testing – Demos
After the benchmarking suites comes some effective gauging of real-world performance: benchmarking tools using real games, or at least, technology present in those games.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat
First up, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat. For this benchmark, we use the High preset, DX11, 1920×1080 resolution, MSAA 4x, SSAO: HBAO, with Tessellation enabled.
Unigine Heaven
Unigine Heaven is an extremely popular tool for measuring GPU performance. It’s free and used in almost every hardware test you’ll have seen in the last 2 years, omitting it simply isn’t an option.
Using DX11, 16x Anisotropy and normal tessellation we ran this test at 4 different Anti-Aliasing settings (0x – 8x).
Alien vs. Predator & Stone Giant
Our next demo benchmark is Alien Vs. Predator. Using DirectX11 and high quality textures, combined with ambient occlusion, tessellation and hardware-intensive anti-aliasing, it utilizes much of what your GPU can do in order to test your hardware effectively.
When configuring Alien Vs. Predator, we used the following settings: Resolution: 1920×1080, Textures: Very High, Shadows: High, Anisotropic Filtering: 16x, SSAO: On, Tessellation: On, DX11 Advanced Shadows: On, MSAA: 0x.
A tool similar to heaven but utilizing the DX11 technologies in a different manner is Stone Giant. Created to show that advanced geometry can be used to create mind-blowingly awesome creatures and landscapes, Stone Giant – much like heaven – utilizes your hardware effectively and pushes it, providing you with FPS information once the run finishes. The settings that were used were: Resolution: 1920×1080, Tessellation: High, Aspect Ratio: 16:9.
We put both the Alien vs Predator and Stone Giant tests together in one easy to read graph.
