Test Your DirectX 9 Performance

One of the surest ways to test your videocard’s DirectX 9 performance is to—you guessed it—fire up a graphics-heavy game that includes a benchmark mode (like the FEAR benchmark we use in our Lab) and let ’er rip. But not every game tests your graphics card’s performance. There’s a reason we use Quake 4 and FEAR for our official benchmark runs: The former is an OpenGL-based game that’s far more dependent on your CPU than your videocard, whereas the latter is a better demonstration of GPU-based prowess.

If you have no acceptable games to test your rig’s performance, the next best thing is a free solution from Futuremark. Head over to the site and grab yourself the demo of 3DMark05. You might be tempted to download a later version for upgradeability’s sake—don’t. We’ve found that 3DMark05 pushes your graphics card more than later versions, which test the CPU a bit more.

The 3DMark05 official score throws your CPU into the mix, but you can get adequate FPS results from the app’s graphics-only tests.

Since the program’s a demo, you won’t get to edit any settings—you can’t adjust antialiasing, the resolution, or anything else. However, 3DMark05 will scale depending on the power of your graphics card, and there are numerous websites and forums you can visit to compare your demo score to the scores other rigs achieve!

Test Your DirectX 10 Performance

So you’ve plunked down big bucks for that fancy DirectX 10 card and you’re curious whether all the different drivers, tweaks, and overclocks have had any effect. The best free benchmark we’ve found is a DirectX 10 demo from Call of Juarez. It runs through a series of in-engine settings that test everything from particle effects to HDR antialiasing to shadows.

To squeeze more frames out of your DX10 card, reduce antialiasing. Your images will get a little jaggier, but you’ll see frame rates rise.

As with any benchmark, you’ll want to run multiple iterations of the graphical test to account for any errors or extraneous factors during the run. That said, the scores should be consistent, if not identical, across all three runs. If they aren’t, double-check to see if there’s anything eating up your computer’s resources in the background!