MaximumPC 2007 112

One of the surest ways to test your video-

card’s DirectX 9 performance is to—you

guessed it—fire up a graphics-heavy game

that includes a benchmark mode (like the

FEAR benchmark we use in our Lab) and

let ’er rip. But not every game tests your

graphics card’s performance. There’s a

reason we use

Quake 4 and FEAR

for our official

benchmark runs:

The former is an

OpenGL-based

game that’s far

more dependent

on your CPU than

your videocard,

whereas the latter is a better demonstra-

tion of GPU-based prowess.

If you have no acceptable games to

test your rig’s performance, the next best

thing is a free solution from Futuremark.

Head over to the site and grab yourself

the demo of 3DMark05. You might be

tempted to download a later version for

upgradeability’s sake—don’t. We’ve found

that 3DMark05 pushes your graphics card

more than later versions, which test the

CPU a bit more.

Since the program’s a demo, you won’t

get to edit any settings—you can’t adjust

antialiasing, the resolution,

or anything else. However,

3DMark05 will scale

depending on the power

of your graphics card,

and there are numerous

websites and forums you

can visit to compare your

demo score to the scores

other rigs achieve!

Test Your DirectX 9 Performance

So you’ve plunked down big bucks for that

fancy DirectX 10 card and you’re curious

whether all the different drivers, tweaks, and

overclocks have had any effect. The best

free benchmark we’ve found is a DirectX 10

demo from Call of Juarez. It runs through a

series of in-engine settings that test every-

thing from particle effects to HDR antialias-

ing to shadows.

As with any benchmark, you’ll want to

run multiple iterations of the graphical test

to account for any errors or extraneous fac-

tors during the run. That said, the scores

should be consistent, if not identical, across

all three runs. If they aren’t, double-check to

see if there’s anything eating up your com-

puter’s resources in the background!

Test Your DirectX 10

Performance

december 2007 MAXIMUMPC 

The 3DMark05 official

score throws your CPU

into the mix, but you

can get adequate FPS

results from the app’s

graphics-only tests.

To squeeze more frames out of your DX10 card, reduce antialiasing.

Your images will get a little jaggier, but you’ll see frame rates rise.