The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Publisher: Bethesda

From our The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim review:

'It’s like watching Star Wars and genuinely thinking, ‘what about those poor Death Star construction workers?’ You’re missing the point: Skyrim is a huge and engaging world to explore and it treats you with great moments, from your first dragon encounter to finally being able to craft dwarven armour.'

We've updated our Skyrim benchmark to include the official high resolution texture pack, available as a free DLC. We set the game to its 'Ultra' setting and record a sixty second manual play through just outside the town of Whiterun during a thunderstorm. We use a section where we are able to run forward in a straight line for a minute without being attacked so the benchmark remains consistent, and use the third person camera view.

Many modern games make little use of the CPU, instead ploughing resources into the GPU, making the CPU’s impact on high-resolution performance difficult to test. As such, we’ve drafted in the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, one of the easier games in our 3D benchmark suite, as well as a GeForce GTX 690 4GB to remove as many of the graphical limitations as possible. We’ve still tested at a meaningful resolution however, and with ultra-detail and high-resolution textures (although no AA).




Crysis 2
Publisher: EA

From our Crysis 2 Review:

'When we played Crysis 2 on the consoles, we honestly could have taken or left it. Only on the PC do we feel comfortable recommending and replaying Crytek’s best game yet – and its first chance of matching technical prowess with good game design. '

Crysis 2 is incredibly taxing on all components in a system, from CPU to GPU, so we've chosen to test without AA to generate meaningful and playable frame rates above 1,920 x 1,080. Otherwise, we run the game at its highest 'Ultra' settings and with both the DX11 tessellation pack and high-resolution texture packs installed.

We use the Adrenaline Crysis 2 Benchmark Tool to automate our testing, but capture results in-game using FRAPs as the tool's ability to record minimum frame-rates is inconsistent.

We test using the Times Square time demo, recording minimum and average frame rates from frame 1000 to frame 4900 of the time demo, with the result being the average over 3 runs.