Total War: Attila

Publisher: Sega
We use the built-in Londinium benchmark of Total War: Attila, which runs through an automatic play-through scene in the game. Go to Custom Settings and the benchmark tool is at the bottom. We turn off anti-aliasing and select the quality setting, with v-sync and SSAO disabled. We use Fraps to record a 50-second sequence from the start of the benchmark.

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 Fire Strike

Publisher: Futuremark

Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today's high-performance gaming PCs. It is 3DMark's most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.