Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight today we're talking about how to benchmark your video card this is something we do for games like evolve we test various video cards and determine what the frame rate is at different settings in the game so high settings low settings things like that with your AMD and NVIDIA card this is not too difficult to do as a user if you just want to see how your results compared to ours that way you can sort of see going forward what you should expect in games when we benchmark them and you don't own them yet and that sort of saves you money in determining if your system can run a game to a reasonable frame rate so to this end you really don't need that much in terms of software you can download fraps which is free for the benchmarking utility you pay more for the video but don't bother with that cuz shadowplay has replaced it just download the free version and use the benchmarking logging utility download fraps download fraps with an F and that is a frame rate analyzer looking at the log files that perhaps produces so you need those two tools and then after that you really just use your games that you already have or synthetic benchmarks and so the public benchmarks are by definition not real world so they're not going to be as accurate representing your video cards performs in a real world environment like metro 2033 might be but they are very consistent and they reduce variance in testing so by reducing variants were able to get a more stable understanding of how the video card performs and this is especially important when benchmarking overclocked because when you overclock the video card you are running the risk of introducing instability and using a constant test platform will eliminate that one software side variable when benchmarking using synthetic platforms you also run the risk of not invoking the boost clock accurately fir mark is one of these tools so don't use fir mark anywhere going forward for the most part because it is not actually an accurate representation of how the video card performs because the boost clock won't work as it is designed to do in order to test a game and get the frame rate in a game like evolve which we just did you run fraps go to the fps tab enable logging setup for 60 or 120 seconds that'll give you a solid baseline honestly 60 is pretty reliable for this application you set that set the location where the file is saved and then play the game prove it try to pick a defined course that you can repeat several times without too much variance introduced in the form of combat or dynamic elements in the game once you've repeated this a few times do it three four parity you drop the log file into fraps and you can look at the average FPS the 1% low fps and the minimum FPS minimum and Max fps are basically items you can discard because they are outliers and they're not really going to be a good measurement or understanding of how the card performs 1% low and 0.1% are very good items to replace the minimum fps because it's looking at the 1% low time of your framerate so if you have 30 frames per second one percent of the time meaning 1% out of 60 seconds you get 30 FPS that's that's a more accurate idea of when you get drops in your gameplay aside from these items you can sort of drop it into a spreadsheet or something like that and sort of combine your data I get the averages and then see how the card performs and post it online and tell us how it does compared to our benchmarks that way we can accumulate data let us know your cpu your platform and then other readers will be able to tell how their systems will perform if theirs aren't identical to our test bench so that is the baseline of how to run a framerate test when running fraps you'll see items like frame x frame latency fps min max low all that stuff hit the link in the description below for full detail on what all those things mean it's not too complicated but it's complicated enough that showing you in video is really not going to be too conducive to learning so that is how to benchmark your games at a very basic level hopefully that helps you figure out how well your cards will perform so you can let us know and let other readers know how they're performing and that is all for this video we will see you all next time you