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Freeware Files: Five Punishing Game Benchmarks for your GPU!

David Murphy — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:00:00 -0500

What's the first I did upon hearing the numbers for ATI's new HD Radeon 5870 graphics card? I scrambled for benchmarks, because that's the one thing an announcement and subsequent review of a smokin' new piece of hardware can do for a rabid enthusiast: inspire.

It's been a while since I've actually sat down and crunched the numbers for my killer custom PC (that's killer as in legendary, not NICs). I'm not lazy. Rather, I don't have access to the expensive system benchmarks that magazines and Web sites typically use to analyze the all the new hardware that comes out. I don't have all-in-one benchmarks like PCMark Vantage, GPU-punishing titles like Crysis, and--worst of all--preconfigured demo runs for any number of titles that would help ensure the validity and repeatability of the delivered scores.

In short, I have nothing. You might not have nothing, but odds are good that you are similarly ill-equipped to benchmark your graphics card (and any tweaks or modifications you make) in the style of a professional review. Nothing... until now.

This week's freeware roundup will show you five different games that you can use to punish your poor graphics card into frames-per-second submission. They might cost a grand total of zero dollars, but these tests are repeatable and easy to use--the perfect combination of characteristics for aspiring benchmarkers who might not want to get their hands dirty, but still want some kind of way to determine exactly how powerful their graphics card really is.

X3: Terran Conflict

This demo for the open-ended space simulation game X3: Terran Conflict is like having the Four Horsemen pay a visit to your house and kick your graphics card. It's a DirectX 9 benchmark, which isn't as ideal of a scenario as you'll find in some modern titles that support DirectX 10 functionality. Still, the point of a benchmark is to tax your system to its limits. To that extent, X3: Terran Conflict is a free, fire-starter of a test for your GPU

Download it here!

Resident Evil 5

Killing zombies is fun. Killing zombies at a maximum framerate is even more fun because, er, it accelerates the killing. Right. Although it was original designed, in-part, to test out the 3D capabilities of the game for those equipped with Nvidia-based graphics cards, the Resident Evil 5 benchmark demo is still a solid solution for testing your graphics card's capabilities regardless of manufacturer. Better yet, the RE 5 benchmark comes with the option to run in both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 modes. It's the ideal solution for those looking to test on either a current or legacy architecture... or both.

Close your eyes and download it here!

BattleForge

Okay, everyone who's a DirectX 10-or-higher benchmark, raise your right hand.

*A number of different games raise their hands*

Now everyone who's a DirectX 11-compatible benchmark, raise your left hand.

*BattleForge shoots its second hand in the air and screams as if it was on a rollercoaster*

'nuff said. This game is as graphically punishing as it is future-proofed, for this is the only title on the market as of this article's writing that now supports DirectX 11 functionality. Of course, that's slightly hampered by the fact that there are only two DirectX 11-compatible graphics cards right now. But. Er. The benchmark is free, as BattleForge itself is one of EA's "Play4Free" titles--downloading the game itself costs nothing, as the various bits and pieces that flush out the title's main RTS experience come as microtransactions. Boo those, but yay for free DX11 benchmarks!

Download it here!

Tom Clancy's HAWX

You'll appreciate the GPU benchmark found in Tom Clancy's HAWX in part because the game is just so damn pretty. Watch as your death-from-above aircraft soars over beautifully rendered satellite-generated terrain... provided your graphics card can handle the punishment, that is. This DirectX 9- and DirectX 10-compatible benchmark isn't quite as challenging on the former as it could be, but it's a real killer if you crank the settings on the latter. Can your system handle this game's intense aerial combat? Or will you long for the days of the less graphically robust A-10 Tank Killer?

Download it here!

Crysis

This is the biggie. It's the age-old retort to any video card boast: "Yeah, but can it run Crysis?" There's only one way to find out, and this is it. Install the Crysis demo, then be sure to grab the third-party Crysis Benchmarking Tool. This helpful little utility auto-detects whether you're running the full game or the demo. It also opens up access to a wealth of configurable options that you can set prior to the run--and believe me, you'll be doing a lot of tweaking. This is the end-all be-all of current graphics benchmarks, save for the aforementioned BattleForge DirectX 11 test. But that game just uses the new APIs; Crysis bends your videocard over its knee and slaps it right on the bottom.

Download Crysis here!

Download the Crysis Benchmarking Tool here!

David Murphy (@ Acererak) is a technology journalist and former Maximum PC editor. He writes weekly columns about the wide world of open-source as well as weekly roundups of awesome, freebie software. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you're dying to recommend!

Crytek Showcases Multiplatform CryEngine3

Justin Kerr — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:02:01 -0500

By all accounts Crysis is one of the most talked about PC first person shooters of all time. Few titles even come close to matching the graphical fidelity pumped out by CryEngine2, and let be honest here, this is still our go to game whenever we test out our upgraded rigs. Unfortunately developer Crytek perceived the PC exclusive title as sales dud with piracy projections as high as 20:1, and announced that it was abandoning PC only titles in favor of multiplatform development. Many feared this will lead to a dumbing down of the franchise, but it seems as though Crytek is working hard not only to produce a quality sequel, but also to design one of the most powerful multiplatform engines of all time.

Showcased for the first time at the Game Developers Conference Crytek demonstrated its real time development engine that simultaneously allows developers to make changes to a PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 version of a game. If CryEngine3 lives up to its potential, it could dramatically reduce development time – and cost. Crytek has also been working hard to integrate external tools such as Photoshop into the development environment to manipulate existing textures, and seamlessly inject them into a dynamic game world.

Many perceived the loss of Crytek as an exclusive PC developer to be a blow to our beloved platform, but if they help to design a tool that makes multiplatform releases this easy, we could well see a huge influx of new titles in the future that might have otherwise been console only. Would you agree?

Crytek: Cloud Gaming Firmly Grounded Until 2013

Nathan Grayson — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:07:49 -0500

Crytek boss Cevat Yerli’s desire to be the Miss Cleo of the videogame world is becoming a tad transparent. First, he conjured up visions of the next console generation’s arrival in his crystal ball, and now, he’s predicting that Cloud gaming services like OnLive won’t be viable until – at the earliest – 2013.

"We had our research in 2005 on this subject but we stopped around 2007 because we had doubts about economics of scale. But that was at a time when bandwidth was more expensive," he said.

"We saw that by 2013 - 2015 with the development of bandwidths and household connections worldwide that it might become more viable then."

So why was Crytek’s computer-crippling shooter Crysis plastered all over OnLive’s demo screens at last week’s GDC? Apparently, that was out of Crytek’s hands.

"We're not involved, we just allowed Crysis to be tested on it," he said. "It will be interesting to see how it happens under millions of users. Let's say more than a few hundred users, how it will behave.”

Sounds like he’s really raining on Cloud’s parade. Yeah, we got nothing.

Crysis: Warhead

Will Smith — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:00:00 -0600

We liked Crysis. Despite its less-than-stellar AI, annoying alien baddies, and flawed final mission, we liked it. We liked the game for its wide-open jungle combat and the power and flexibility the nano-suit gave us to approach combat any way we wanted. Whether we wanted to skulk through the jungle, shooting enemies half a klick away with a silenced rifle, or get up close and personal by throwing our enemies through the nearest wall, the game accommodated pretty much any play style.

What was the secret sauce? It’s simple. While Crysis was essentially a linear game that pushed the player down a straight path from one battle to the next, this path was incredibly wide, giving the player a drastically different experience from one play-through to the next. While there were definitely choke points in the game, generally, you could choose when and where you wanted to fight the bad guys. Stalking the enemy and choosing the time and place of every fight was a blast—our major complaint was that there weren’t enough ambush-type weapons such as Claymore mines and detpacks.

Crysis: Warhead finally gives the player the tools to set up elaborate ambushes, but at the same time, the player’s path through the game seems significantly narrower. This limits your options as you play through the game and transforms something that was special into a run-of-the-mill shooter—albeit a very pretty one.

While we’re disappointed by the shrinking game world, we love the greatly improved performance of the stand-alone expansion pack. This is partially due to the inevitable march of progress on the hardware side; Crytek has made some serious optimizations to the default settings as well as the auto-configuration tool. The game automatically chose default settings that produced a good mix of performance and eye candy on all the systems we tested. Naturally, the highly configurable engine lets tweakers crank up the visual quality as high (or low) as they want.

Aside from these changes, the core of the single-player game is essentially the same as the original. The weapons are almost all the same, the nano-suit’s the same, and the bad guys are the same. In Warhead, you play one of your squadmates during the events of the first game. This let Crytek reuse most of the assets and even some of the events from the first game. However, while we appreciate any scriptwriter trying to add depth to our videogame characters, the voice-over flashbacks were more confusing than entertaining, and ultimately unnecessary.

Crytek has also polished and rebranded the multiplayer component of Crysis as Crysis Wars. The framework is an interesting blend of Enemy Territory–style gameplay with traditional team deathmatch. Unfortunately, whether it was the fault of the servers or the game’s large scale, every time we went online, we faced lag bad enough to render the game unplayable, even on servers that registered low pings.

While Crysis: Warhead is a step toward a more mass-market-friendly game, it’s a step back in innovation and fun. Warhead strips many of the amazing design elements that made Crysis fun despite its flaws, and we’re not willing to let them go. While Warhead brings back a lot of the fun of Crysis, especially on the higher difficulty settings, it’s closer to a straight run-and-gun shooter like Call of Duty than it is to the original.

Microsoft's WARP10 Will Let You Run DX10 on CPUs, Crysis at 7 FPS

Paul Lilly — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:15:05 -0600

If your graphics card doesn't support DirectX 10 or 10.1, don't worry about it, Microsoft has your back. The resourceful programmers at Redmond are working on a new component called WARP10 (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) to be included in Windows 7, which essentially ports DX10 duties to the CPU.

The upshot is that everyone will have access to DX10 eye candy even if the hardware doesn't support it. Minimum requirements for WARP10 are the same as they are for Vista - an 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM. So if you have the hardware to run Windows 7, then in theory, you should be able to enable advanced effects regardless of your videocard.

"Our primary goal during WARP10 development was to produce a rasterizer that met or exceeded all the precision and conformance requirements of the Direct3D 10 and 10.1 specifications," writes Andy Glaister, Principal Development Lead of Microsoft Desktop and Graphics Technologies. "We wanted to do this while achieving a high level or reliability and stability. If this rasterizer was going to be used as a fallback for when hardware was not functioning, it’s important that it worked in all scenarios, configurations and different types of machines."

The downside is that everyone will have access to DX10 eye candy, even if the hardware doesn't support it. There's a potential for system vendors and resellers to mislead customers with DX10 marketing, even if the system being sold isn't up to the task. Running Crysis in DX10 mode at just 800x600 with everything set to low, Microsoft benched a Core i7 at 3.0GHz averaging just 7fps. By contrast, the same benchmark pulled an average of 5fps using an Intel integrated DX10 video solution. On an ATI 2400 Pro, that number jumped to 30fps. In short, WARP10 provides minimal gains over integrated graphics, and gets trounced by budget discrete GPUs.

To be fair, Microsoft isn't pitching WARP10 as a replacement for graphics, nor is the company saying DX10 should be rendered on the CPU instead of the GPU. When it comes to gaming, Microsoft sees its rasterizer being used as a diagnostic tool to help developers validate any visual artifacts as being rendering errors or problems with the hardware or drivers.

Sons of Minesweeper

Thomas McDonald — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:00:00 -0500

So is PC gaming hosed? That seems to be the case for games that a) are not massively multiplayer, b) don’t have “Sims” in the title, or c) aren’t played by your mom.

But it’s not really as dire as all that. Mass Effect actually made it to number 2, and Sins of a Solar Empire to number 9, on the current NPD PC sales charts.

Those numbers, however, don’t reflect where PC owners are really gettin’ their game on: with casual games. Remember when you would say you were a PC gamer and people would say, “Yeah, me too,” and you’d ask what they played, and they’d say, “Minesweeper and Solitaire.” And you’d chuckle. Good times!

I still laugh to think about it, but now it’s a painful, strangled (nay, rueful) laugh, because the Sons of Minesweeper are now dominating the PC gaming industry. I actually like casual games, since they load fast, fill a few minutes that might otherwise be spent strangling editors, and go away quickly.

If game manufacturers are wondering why their once-loyal PC gamer hardcore fan base is finally throwing up their hands and/or certain fingers in disgust and frustration, they need only read their own boxes. Remember Crysis, the game that would knock your PC to the ground and pound its chips till it cried for mommy? Well, Crysis was a PC-only game, and its minimum specs were a Pentium 4 2.8GHz or comparable, 1GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT or better (Vista specs are higher). And that was for people who liked to watch slide shows. The system capable of playing Crysis at full-res with solid frame rates is currently busy running the new supercollider.

Now along toddles the PC version of Assassin’s Creed, which Xbox 360 owners finished and sold back to GameStop about a year ago, and the minimum system specs make Crysis seem like a girly-game: Pentium dual-core 2.6GHz, 2GB RAM, 256MB DirectX 10.0 card. Recommended specs for people who want to, you know, actually interact with the game in real time? About twice that.

Screw that. Where’s the link for Bejeweled?

Crytek CEO Bemoans Software Piracy, Claims 20:1 Ratio

Paul Lilly — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:31:27 -0500

In a recent interview, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli blasted the PC industry as "the most intensely pirated market ever." By his own estimation, Yerli believes the sales-to-piracy ratio could be as high as 1 to 20, or in other words, for every videogame legitimately sold, 20 more are illegally downloaded or copied.

Yerli also critiqued certain aspects of Crysis, saying sales were hurt by mislabeling the game's visual quality settings. "Our medium could easily compete with any high, and very high should have been ultra high as a means of futurizing," Yerli commented. And he's probably right, given that Crysis can make even high end rigs cry for mercy when tasked with the highest quality settings and a high resolution. Because of this, Yerli wonders how many gamers have passed over the title waiting for the hardware to catch up.

Expect a less aggressive labeling scheme in Warhead, and though it might be an exercise in futility, Yerli also promises it will be harder to crack.

Where Lies the Point of Diminishing Returns?

Will Smith — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:55:33 -0500

In the July issue, I tested HP’s Mini-Note—the small, cheap notebook is HP’s answer to the subcompact, sub-$500 Asus Eee PC. HP’s tiny notebook got me thinking about the point of diminishing PC returns—the point at which adding more hardware oomph doesn’t deliver a perceptible performance boost to the user.

During the usability portion of my testing—wherein I use the laptop in a variety of real-world scenarios (at my desk, on the kitchen table, on the couch, on the plane, etc.), I was shocked that the Mini-Note seemed fast enough for much of what I do. While the notebook certainly underperformed in our Photoshop benchmark, I didn’t have any major complaints with its performance in my most common activities: web browsing, checking email, writing documents, and listening to music. Is this Mini-Note’s 1.2GHz VIA C7-M CPU fast enough for me?

Answer: no. After I dug a little deeper, I uncovered some serious performance problems. The rig is simply too slow to play H.264 video at DVD resolution, and without dedicated graphics, I wouldn’t recommend running even the most rudimentary 3D games.

The Mini-Note doesn’t trip the diminishing-returns perimeter wire, but it comes close. It’s too bad HP didn’t include decent onboard graphics (something with basic 3D support and a little bit of video decoding help) because that would make this sub-$1,000 rig everything I need in a portable.

Ironically, it’s at the other end of the PC hardware spectrum that I discovered technology that has indeed reached the point of diminishing returns. And I’m sad to report that that technology is 3D gaming graphics. Take a look at two of the biggest games of last year, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis. Crysis is a technological showcase, utilizing the latest, greatest DirectX 10 graphics technology to render a vibrant, living world. Call of Duty 4, meanwhile, is a showcase of last-generation DirectX 9 technology. This game is technically inferior but deftly executed.

Now, were you to show both titles to a gamer who doesn’t know what subtle, delicious effects to look for in DirectX 10 rendering, there’s absolutely no guarantee that he’ll pick Crysis as the more advanced game. In fact, because there are more characters onscreen at any given time in Call of Duty and because the scripted action is much more intense than it is in Crysis, I’d wager that he’s more likely to select Call of Duty as the more visually sophisticated game.

The upshot is that I think we’re rapidly approaching the limits of what today’s technology can deliver in terms of visual quality increases. In order to make the next jump—the jump to real-time 3D rendering that looks as good as prerendered movie CGI—the hardware vendors and game developers are going to have to try something new. Am I right, wrong, or absolutely crazy? Let me know at will@maximumpc.com.