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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!

Comcast Closes in on Bandwidth Limits and Overage Charges

<a href="/david_murphy">David Murphy<br /></a> — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:17:32 -0500

I thought I had seen the last of Comcast's traffic-shaping practices, but the Emperor of ISPs has been off concocting a new plan--a concrete, measurable method that will give the provider unprecedented control over its bandwidth. But this won't be like it's been in times prior, when Comcast would simply block or otherwise inhibits your access to the file transfer protocols of your choosing (ok, Bittorrent). Comcast is leaving your Internet habits up to you: fill the pipe as much as you want, but if your downloads burst the tube, you're going to pay big.

DSLReports.com quotes an anonymous Comcast representative for the full details of the alleged plan. All Internet subscribers will be allotted 250GB per month in download capacity. Go over, and you're fine... once. After your single freebie, Comcast will bill you $15 for every 10GB you exceed. There's no word whether you'll still get booted off the network for exceeding an undisclosed, theoretical maximum, but you'll likely be booted out of your parents' basement once that monthly bill hits.

That said, 250GB worth of downloading is a stupid-large amount of bandwidth. The Silicon Valley Insider has done an awesome job detailing just what it would take to get hit with the $15 overage charges based on a typical computer user's workload. But I've brainstormed a few additional examples that also apply. You'd have to:

Purchase 35 to 60 of Steam's largest titles each month (or download Portal 253 times)
Download one 1080p-quality movie per day
Browse the flickr pages of 243,809 users. Or you could just check out one user's page... and download all 85,528 of his 10.1 megapixel pictures.
Be your own Team Fortress 2 team. Playing 24 hours a day for each day in the month, by yourself, would only cost you 62 GB of bandwidth. But hey, that's why you need to multibox as a Soldier, a Medic, a Heavy...

I could go on, but you get the point. Unless you're trying to win the popularity award at The Pirate Bay, you're going to have a hard time filling that 250GB reservoir with your legitimate normal use, even if you consider yourself a heavy user. For once, I applaud Comcast for setting a reasonable bandwidth limit before it swings the hammer. And more so than that, I think it's great that Comcast is finally telling its users exactly what standards they'll be measured by -- and even going so far as to allude to a utility that you might be able to download that could match up your usage approximation with Comcast's.

How Comcast Gives Your Bank Account the Business

This company isn't getting any more praise out of me, because there are still two overwhelming flaws with Comcast's plan. Should you happen to go over the limit--without first being killed by your neighbors who are sharing the same cable hub--you're going to be paying an absurd amount of money for your transgression. Not to sound like Abe Simpson, but it's highway robbery. Consider the math:

Comcast charges $43 per month (minus taxes, fees, and only if you have pre-existing cable service) for its lowest tier of Internet service.
If Comcast gives you 250GB of "free" use per month, you're getting 5.81 gigabytes for every dollar you spend.
Comcast charges $15 for every 10GB of overage.
Thus, you pay 0.66 gigabytes for every dollar you spend in overage fees.

So what does the Internet cost? Should we go by Comcast's normal pricing structure -- 5.81 gigabytes per dollar -- or its overage pricing structure which incidentally, would cost you $375 dollars per month for 250GB of service. If the overage fee is designed to penalize subscribers, this represents 8.7 times that of Comcast's normal fee for comparable service. That's an unacceptable and illogical exploitation, and completely out of line from the market value of the service.

In A Perfect World...

Comcast should sell users additional bandwidth based on the original rates, or worth, of the service. If Joe Downloader uses 500GB of bandwidth, then he should be billed the same as if he just doubled his water intake for the month: a rate based on his actual use, not a punishment for going above an imaginary threshold. According to Comcast, its new suspected policies will affect 0.1 percent of its 14.1 million users. So let these 14,000 or so customers pay a fair extra for their bandwidth. If anything, Comcast's the winner in the deal: subscribers that underuse the service would still be charged at a flat rate of $43 per month (overvaluing their share of the bandwidth), and the chunk of the tube they don't use can go to others for a normal market value.

The situation gets stickier when you consider the fact that Comcast touts speedier service as an upgradable addition to its flat Internet subscription. For $67 a month, you can have downloads up to 4 Mbps faster than what you'd get on its bottom-rung Internet services. So why, then, are these subscribers -- who might very well download more as a result of their package -- not being given a similar, tiered structure for their monthly download limit? If they're receiving a 33 percent increase to their download speeds, there's no reason why they shouldn't be upgraded to a monthly download rate of 330GB.

But not all is fair or reasonable in the world of internet service. And while bits of Comcast's proposed plan seem fair considering the alternative--Time Warner's mulling limits of 5 to 40GB per month with a $1 per gigabyte overage fee--consumers shouldn't let the bull in the china shop just because it's wearing a pretty hat. At the end of the day, Comcast is a business. It's a big business. And just as it used to tout unlimited service while limiting your Bittorrents, so it is equally happy to protect the integrity of its bandwidth by unfairly pummeling your bank account into submission.