Making a Fair Gfx Benchmarking Utility?

Moggie68 asks: "Always when the big two release new GPU's and graphics cards that reach astounding heights with their benchmark scores, the same heated debate about unfair benchmarking utilities rises again. But what about the flipside of the coin? Would it really be that easy to construct a fair benchmarking utility for GPU's and graphics cards? What facts need to be considered? What problems solved?"

Comments

Stick to the games

[NanoGator]

Just stick to using popular games. Seriously.

Here's the problem: ATI and NVidia have diverged a bit. They get performance upgrades from different optimizations/workflows. For this reason, performance is more a question of which card the game developer favors than it is about which card is better. Granted, what I'm saying isn't quite as black and white as that, but it's worth considering that if the benchmark uses an optimization that the game doesn't, then the benchmark is misleading.

I don't find video card benchmarks interesting, but I do enjoy CPU benchmarks. I'm a 3D artist, so render speed is very important to me. I recently had to go through the "Do I want a P4 or Athlon?" debate. Lightwave comes with benchmark scenes. You're supposed to load the scene, hit the render button, and write the number down. Some decent sites actually do the benchmark that way. That is a selling point for me, not the rest of those idiotic benchmarks that they throw in there. Yeah, like I care about how fast Office is.

I hope my point got across. Real world numbers are gold, theoretical numbers are pyrite.

Fair Benchmarks

[m0rph3us0]

There is no such thing as a fair benchmark. Each persons needs differ and therefore a different product suits those needs best. Best thing to do, is grab demo's of the things you like to do with your video cards and then head down to your local computer store and see how it works.