Battlefield 1

Publisher: Electronic Arts


We use the DirectX 12 API and the game's 'Ultra' preset. We benchmark a section of the single-player campaign as this is the most repeatable and reliable means, though we've chosen a part that we found to be representative of the more demanding areas. Specifically, it's a manual, 30-second run through the start of the mission 'The Runner'.

Unigine Valley 1.0

Publisher: Unigine

Unigine's free Valley 1.0 benchmarking tool works well as a graphics benchmark as it is GPU-limited and is thus incredibly taxing on the GPU whilst placing the CPU under very little stress. Unigine's scoring system is effectively linear: a card with 2,000 points is considered twice as fast as one with 1,000 points, and half as fast as one with 4,000 points. As such, you can easily replicate and run the test on your own system to gauge roughly how big a difference an upgrade would likely make for you.

3DMark Time Spy CPU Test

Publisher: Futuremark

3DMark recently added Time Spy, a DirectX 12 benchmark that runs at 1440p. It is designed to properly utilise the advantages of the DirectX 12 API. The benchmark is available for free but you'll need to pay to change any of the settings, including the resolution. Nonetheless, it still serves as a useful at-a-glance comparison of performance in this increasingly important API and we include the CPU test score in CPU and motherboard reviews.