First post, by sheath
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello,
I have been reading all of the benchmark and comparison threads searching for some sort of standard solution for benchmarking Windows 98, SGL, 3DFX, Direct X, Open GL games and hardware. I am currently stalled with Rage software's Expendable. I see benchmark charts out there, but can't find the timedemo command line for Expendable. Does anyone care to spell it out for me?
I'd really like to put all of the benchmark hints and tricks into a single thread if it hasn't been done already. I've seen Phil's DOS benchmarking project, which I will definitely be participating in also. I love that his project runs from a simple batch file, can this be replicated for Win98 games? Quake II and III are easy to benchmark with their timedemos. Others don't leave log files so I'm debating how to record thier performance in such a way that I don't miss the outliers or average the frame rates wrong.
This writer references some software "that saves the frame rate for each frame of a demo, so that you can analyze it later." I don't even think FRAPS does this in a reasonable and easy to parse way.
http://www.thg.ru/graphic/19981007/index-01.html
In addition to something like that, which I think I could painstakingly replicate with a random screenshot using FRAPS with the counter visible, I have one more bit of info I'd like to eventually collect for each game. If any game developer has boasted how many polygons per frame their game averaged, or peaked at I'd love to catalog each source and what their claims are. For example, various sites online claim that Quake III Arena is averaging 10,000 polygons per frame, but others claim 15,000 polygons per frame. By contrast the Dreamcast's peak polygons per second was supposedly 3.5 million polygons per second, which would be 116,000 polygons per second at 30FPS. Yes, I know, polygons per second is just marketing performance, but the comparison is very interesting to me and I am looking for as standard that can be applied across all engines that can be recorded in some way.
Another interesting benchmark idea harkens from the 2D generations, in simply counting animated objects on screen and framerate to determine some measure of performance. This would definitely make a distinction between 3D FPS with only one or two enemies on screen, and those with dozens for example. It would break down with destructable environments however. Then there is multi-pass rendering effects, which the PS2 apparently excels at. How would one measure something that is only visible in motion? And so, unless this fine group can help, I will continue lurking on 90s benchmark reviews and prior threads until I run out of ways to search.
Thank you for your time and consideration.