Benchmarking the Benchmarks

apoppin writes "HardOCP put video card benchmarking on trial and comes back with some pretty incredible verdicts. They show one video returning benchmark scores much better than another compared to what you get when you actually play the game. Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks."

Comments

back in my day...

[Aranykai]

We used to benchmark a computer by *gasp* actually running things on it. If you wanted to find out how well it would perform running a game, you played the damn game and found out. Course, thats not good enough for these ubernoobs who think they are cool with their benchmark scores on their forum signatures...

Re:back in my day...

[SQLGuru]

And, on top of that, they are on your lawn....

Layne

Re:back in my day...

[Sancho]

The problem is that it's hard to objectively score performance by "running things on it." Benchmarks are nice because they run the exact same tests every time. You can't just turn on FPS display and walk around in the game to measure performance--your actions may not be the same each time, and slight variations could cause drastically different results.

Benchmarking provides potential customers with a metric to compare potential purchases.

Re:back in my day...

[donscarletti]

There is indeed a bare minimum hardware performance required to play but sadly many new games, especially Crysis, that bare minimum is scarily close to the market's maximum. Benchmarks are supposed to be a way to isolate this and objectively measure it so that a good purchasing decision can be made by the consumer and when the game is played hopefully the subjective experience of enjoyment will follow. A framerate above human perception is needed for fun (as jerky frames lead to nausia and frustration), high detail is needed for the beauty of a game which is probably just as important (it's been the basis for visual art, music and poetry for millennia).

The reason we've got so far and now can have computers, electricity, aeroplanes, cars, etc. is because of the willingness of scientifically inclined individuals to isolate, experiment and measure. Technology is one of the things in life that can be measured and I think it is a good idea to continue to do it, provided we can do it right. Experimentation and science is what got us out of caves no?

As for Hardocp, what have they proven? Apparently traditional time demos run a fairly linear amount faster than realtime demos, even though it has been acknowledged that realtime demos render more including weapons, characters and effects that the canned demo does not. This would be interesting if the question was "how fast can Crysis run on different cards" but that's not what people want to know. What I'd want to know is which card should I buy to allow me to continue to play cutting edge games for as long as possible while enjoying their whole beauty but not getting a framerate low enough to make me uncomfortable. It just so happens that the card with the best timedemo benchmark has the best actual playthrough benchmark and by roughly the same factor. The only difference is that the traditional timedemo depends on only the graphics hardware whereas the playthrough benchmark depends on efficiency elsewhere in the engine (AI physics), where the player spent most time and if reviewing subjectively, the reviewers current mindset and biases.

Somebody please think of the science!

Re:back in my day...

[billcopc]

It's funny that you mention Crysis... people are freaking out over Crysis the same way they freaked out over Aero Glass a year ago. The reality is, Crysis runs fine on midrange gaming systems. It won't run in 1920x1200 with DX10 eyecandy on that crusty old Geforce 6200, but it certainly does not require a $2500 powerhouse to be enjoyable.

In the end, benchmarks can be useful as long as you don't accept their results as the gospel truth. Some benchmarks favor ATI, some favor NVidia, and I'm sure there's gotta be one benchmark that favors Intel Extreme Graphics :P... the important thing is to find parallels that relate to your own needs and wants so you can put those numbers into perspective.

Synthetics not entirely useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Benchmarking using actual games is, of course, important. But part of the reason a lot of us buy video cards and such isn't JUST about the performance on today's games, but for how they'll play the games coming out in the next few months. Synthetic benchmarks often implement advanced features not currently seen in today's games, but which will be implemented in just-over-the-horizon games. So while clearly one ought not judge a card purely on 3DMark or similar benchmarking suites, they do have their uses.

Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, a benchmark is a controlled test performed "on a bench" - meaning, in a controlled environment with specific, well-described procedures.

You must perform the same exact test on all video cards, disclose any variables, and you must not "pick a subset of completed tests to publish". You must not compare tests performed using different procedures, no matter how slight the deviation of the procedures are.

One cannot draw conclusions about "real world" performance from a benchmark. The benchmark is merely an indicator. A "real world" test that uses the strong, formalized procedures of a benchmark IS a benchmark - and suddenly, the benchmark is not "real world" - because the "real world" doesn't have formal procedures for gameplay.

Haphazard "non-blind" gameplay on a random machine is NOT a benchmark, and it can not provide useful, comparable numbers.

A good benchmark is one where (1) most experts agree that it has validity, and (2) one where the tester cannot change the rules of the game.

The numbers of a benchmark are meaningless, except in terms of being compared to one another using the same exact procedure.

Re:Would like to see a real world comparison for E

[Digital Vomit]

I have what was a "hot" card only eighteen months ago (7800) ago and now it is stuttering on some of the newer content when I'm raiding.

Are you one of those software pirates?

Re:OSS

[snoyberg]

PS yes...release your rage and mod me down.... just makes my post more Insightful.

Translation: if you mod me down, I will become more insightful than you can possibly imagine.

Re:My old benchmark

[sempernoctis]

My favorite benchmark for finding the size of the memory heap:

void doit(int i) { printf("%i\n", i); doit(i + 1); }

worked really well until I tried it in an environment where the call stack could get paged...then it turned into a hard drive benchmark