Terragen 3

Website:Terragen 3

Planetside Software’s Terragen 3 is a highly realistic landscape generator used to create background images in films and games such as Star Trek: Nemesis, Stealth and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Our script renders a single frame of a snowy mountain scene at 640 x 480 on all the available CPU execution units.

Cinebench R15 64-bit

Website: www.maxon.net

Cinebench uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a photo-realistic scene of some shiny balls and weird things (we miss the motorbike). The scene is highly complex, with reflections, ambient occlusion and procedural shaders so it gives a CPU a tough workout.

As Cinema 4D is a real-world application - used on films such as Spider-Man and Star Wars - Cinebench can be viewed as a real-world benchmark.

Battery Life

We complete two separate tests to assess battery life. Firstly, we run Unigine Valley's benchmark continuously to simulate a lengthy gaming session. This is performed at half brightness with Wi-Fi enabled and the maximum performance mode enabled in Windows.

The other test uses PCMark 8's Coventional Battery Test. This simulates using web browsers, spreadsheets and other light non-gaming tasks that should give you an idea of how long the battery will last under typical conditions. For this test, we reduce brightness to minimum and the power setting to Power Saver mode, but leave Wi-Fi enabled.