-Built in Demo : A lot of games these days come with a pre-recorded demo which the manufacturer deliberately includes for gamers to benchmark the game and gauge the performance of their systems. It gives you an idea of how well your PC will be able to run the game. This sort of benchmark is good since the exact same scene is run each time you play it. This gives you consistent Frame rate results. The downside is that it may not necessarily be comparable to the actual gameplay performance in the game for a variety of reasons. For example Artificial Intelligence (AI), or sound might be disabled in the demo but real world gaming will obviously have that.
-Real world Benching : A lot of benchers prefer real world benching. They use a program called FRAPS which runs in the background and monitors your frame rates as you play the game . This is useful since you get an idea of the actual gameplay performance. Another benefit is that you get frame rates recorded with time so you can clearly see when your fps dipped below average and what not. You can also very easily get the min, max and average frame rates. However, your results will not be consistent and totally accurate, you will not be able to make a full comparison between your results and someone else's and its tedious !
For this analysis, I have performed the benchmarks at 4 different CPU settings.
3.00 GHZ (1333 X 9) Stock Setting
3.40 GHZ (1600 X 8.5)
3.80 GHZ (1600 X 9.5)
4.12 GHZ (1735 X 9.5) The highest stable setting I am willing to bench at without raising my VCORE (CPU Voltage) too high
The graphic card clocks were kept the same through out the analysis. They were 720 MHZ Core / 1470 MHZ Shader / 2480 MHZ Memory.
BENCHMARKS USED
Half Life 2: Lost Coast
FEAR
Oblivion (Fraps)
Devil May Cry DX 10 Demo
Race Driver : GRID (FRAPS)
Assassin's Creed (FRAPS)
Far Cry 2 DX10
Unreal Tournament III
Call of Juarez DX10 Benchmark
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea DX10 Demo
Crysis Demo GPU Test
Crysis Demo CPU Test
Call of Duty: World at War (FRAPS )
Cryostasis Demo
Stalker : Clear Sky Demo
Lost Planet DX 10 Benchmark
World in Conflict Demo
Fallout 3
The benchmarks are a mix of old and new games and a lot of graphic engines have been put to the test bench. We will see how each of these engines respond to varying CPU speeds at high image quality and resolution.
RESULTS
I will start by showing some graphs that tell a story that will be surprising for most of the readers. There were some games that showed no change, yes, no change whatsoever when the CPU clock speed was varied from 3.0 GHZ to 4.0 GHZ. Take a look for yourself:
There has been a follow up to this article...CPU Bottleneck Analysis revisited.