GPU Test System 2025 Games Selection

[Onasi]

@Dr. Dro
Anything DX9 will be bottlenecked by its single-threaded nature on most modern GPUs. I think GameGPU recently benched the OG STALKER and all current cards pretty much posted the exact same performance. They didn’t have Arc there, so that might be interesting due to the translation layer, but I frankly don’t think that you’re going to get unplayable performance even on those nowadays after driver fixes.

 

[Dr. Dro]

@Dr. Dro
Anything DX9 will be bottlenecked by its single-threaded nature on most modern GPUs. I think GameGPU recently benched the OG STALKER and all current cards pretty much posted the exact same performance. They didn’t have Arc there, so that might be interesting due to the translation layer, but I frankly don’t think that you’re going to get unplayable performance even on those nowadays after driver fixes.

But we'll also have good data on modern processors, which are generally outrageously powerful - depending on what game someone might be intending to play, that can help people make an informed decision as well which is the point of a review.

 

[Onasi]

@Dr. Dro
Sure, but wouldn’t that make more sense for the CPU bench then?

 

[Dr. Dro]

@Dr. Dro
Sure, but wouldn’t that make more sense for the CPU bench then?

Perhaps, perhaps. I feel like a single older API game is also a good addition that mostly other reviewers won't cover. Especially at modern high resolutions such as 4K.

 

[Onasi]

@Dr. Dro
No, yeah, I getchu, I wouldn’t mind seeing something famously CPU bound like the OG Crysis or Supreme Commander. But it WOULD be more of a CPU test than anything else. GPUs would run on those only as fast as that ST performance allows.

 

[nguyen]

Lies of P - UE4
Age Of Mythology Retold - Bang! Engine
Dragon's Dogma 2

 

[Hankieroseman]

I thought I'd make it a bit more interactive this time..

Left is the games i'm currently using, middle is what i will definitely use, right is titles that are worth considering

This is expected to be used for Dec 2024 till May 2025, then I'll revisit everything (this is NOT whole year 2025)

View attachment 372225

Thoughts? Opinions on the options? anything I missed?

I want to have a good mix of engines and popular titles. None that are always online.

Flight Simulation is my game. Otherwise it's Spider.

 

[TSiAhmat]

Maybe Monster Hunter World/Iceborne? An Entry for MT Framework. Also was rather GPU heavy in the Time i played it but maybe to old.

 

[wolf]

LEGO Horizon Adventures?

Struggling to think of many as you have so many appropriate ones listed already.

 

[W1zzard]

Added:
- Like a Dragon 8, becuase unique engine
- HFW, because decima engine
- Ratchet and Clank, because newest title with insomniac engine, which will get used in Spiderman 2 on PC in Q1 2025

 

[Dragokar]

Is Enlisted with the Dagor 6 engine an option? Devs are Darkflow and Publisher is Gaijin.

 

[W1zzard]

Is Enlisted with the Dagor 6 engine an option? Devs are Darkflow and Publisher is Gaijin.

Works offline?

 

[Macro Device]

Crysis Remastered with everything, RT included, maxed out perhaps? Let's change the title from "can it run Crysis?" to "how well can it run Crysis?"

 

[W1zzard]

Crysis Remastered with everything, RT included, maxed out perhaps? Let's change the title from "can it run Crysis?" to "how well can it run Crysis?"

Huge flop, definitely won't be using it. I had it in the past and nobody cared. I wonder how Crytek is still in business

https://imgur.com/1rBoVhA

 

[Macro Device]

Well, at least I tried suggesting a game engine not present in your list.

 

[Onasi]

I wonder how Crytek is still in business

Hunt, mostly. License fees for the engine too, though it’s not crazy popular - I think the only notable upcoming game using it is Kingdome Come 2. Though they did get like 70 million from Amazon for the license, though it was a while ago. And, since they are the largest game developer in Germany, also government handouts.
Tencent apparently wanted to buy them out couple of years ago, though that deal fell through.

Works offline?

Nah.

 

[Dragokar]

Works offline?

Via ingame mods and some modified .bat but not strictly offline, so I guess not really useful.

Crytek is doing very well with Hunt Showdown/1896.

 

[Bobaganoosh]

Ah, I see. Need to be currently released. Mmm, that's a bit tough, most of the first "PS5 Pro" mid-generation heavy games will be having early 2025 releases... otherwise your selection seems already pretty solid, covering pretty much all currently utilized game engines. We're in a bit of a lull regarding big name releases right now.

I see you only have one Unity game in the list, though the games that I know are built with Unity are either online or relatively niche games. Subnautica 2 is still a very long time away... Still think you should add FFXIV Dawntrail, though.

7 Days to Die (Unity) is finally out of early access lol. Fairly popular and you can play offline, but I don't know if you can play the same save over and over and get the same results. It's uhhh...special.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

7 Days to Die (Unity) is finally out of early access lol. Fairly popular and you can play offline, but I don't know if you can play the same save over and over and get the same results. It's uhhh...special.

Voxel random-gen world, heavy on particle effects, and lots of entity AI. Eats CPU and GPU both for breakfast.

It is now out of Early Access but they seem to be prepping for some major content drops, so I didn't suggest it.

 

[Bobaganoosh]

Voxel random-gen world, heavy on particle effects, and lots of entity AI. Eats CPU and GPU both for breakfast.

It is now out of Early Access but they seem to be prepping for some major content drops, so I didn't suggest it.

That's why I suggested it, actually (the eating GPUs for breakfast part). It's fair that it may be bad for benchmarking, but if you had some time on your hands, you could probably figure out which settings really hit which hardware and modify a map-save accordingly. For example, too many trees usually results in frame-drops. So if you plant a forest for harvesting wood, you better not have done that in proximity to your horde base or it's going to get real dicey for you trying to make shots when the FPS have left the building.

I don't think their major content drops will effect performance that much, but I'm not 100% sure on that. Possibly from an AI perspective I guess, as they are eventually planning to add more NPCs that you can interact with. I think that's still a ways out though.

Additionally, (I haven't verified this on the latest build or two, but it's probably still relevant) the game tends to reeeeally prefer having about 4 cores that are really fast. Beyond that it doesn't care. So historically it did really well on intel P-cores, assuming it was properly utilizing them. I used to set the launcher to only use the P-cores just to make sure it did and it was quite beneficial, but that sort of optimization is not always ideally suited for benchmarking as you're usually trying to show out-of-box.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but the thought was that it's probably the most hardware-intense Unity game I've played (or seen as far as I know) and being you can adjust horde-timing, spawns, and you can save an offline game, it seems like you could actually set up some scenarios (with a little variation time to time from random zombie spawns of course) where you run/walk/drive/bicycle through some regions of the game and this could be set up in one way to compare GPU performance, and you could tweak settings and in-game builds (with trees for example) to also really test CPUs. Usually I just complain about Unity, but this thread got me really thinking about how this game could show strengths/weaknesses in hardware that is a bit different than all the other games going to UE5.

 

[68Olds]

hmm .. maybe flight simulator 2024 if they were able to fix the extreme cpu-bottleneck and it works offline

How about FS2020 instead? It's still pretty demanding and everything is local, rather than trying to stream textures.

 

[W1zzard]

View attachment 372375
Added:
- Like a Dragon 8, becuase unique engine
- HFW, because decima engine
- Ratchet and Clank, because newest title with insomniac engine, which will get used in Spiderman 2 on PC in Q1 2025

Just realized I also need to add Hogwarts, to represent UE4, so I have 26 games now, which means I have to drop one, which is Hellblade 2, simply because it's yet another UE5 title and the one with the least commercial success (based on Steam review number)

 

[trparky]

Hardware Unboxed tests Diablo 4 even though it is criticized for good reason.

 

[freeagent]

MSFS 2020 works my GPU pretty hard. Maxes out core power at just over 300w, and board power gets pretty high. Same with RoboCop lol..

Outside of those 2 games, only F@H maxes out my board power at ~400w and I can see around ~375w with those games depending on where I go.

 

[izy]

You should include some MMOs , like WOW , at least for the CPU benchmarks, you can use the PTR for an easy and more consistent benchmark , i know its a bit tricky but worth a shot.