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THG's Secret Test Sauces Revealed

1:04 PM - June 13, 2005 by Patrick Schmid

1. THG Benchmark Method Revealed
2. Preparation
3. OpenGL
4. Quake III Team Arena
5. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory
6. DirectX 8
7. 3DMark 2003
8. DirectX 9
9. Far Cry
10. Doom 3
11. Video Encoding And Editing
12. Studio 9 Plus
13. DivX And XviD Encoding With Auto Gordian Knot

We all know about THG's benchmarks, but what are our procedures that form the basis for our famous tests? From point scales to time measurements to percentage-based evaluations, we have detailed our benchmark methodology by chunking it down into easy-to-understand descriptions and diagrams. As you'll see, it doesn't take any witchcraft to develop the necessary benchmarks, but mostly a lot of hard work. You may not become a hardware tester overnight, but you should be able to at least benchmark your own system and components.

We describe 23 different benchmark programs, some of which you've probably already heard of. But we've also thrown in some specialty software developed by THG for analysis and performance testing.

Specifically, the benchmark programs we use include:

five well-known game titles;
two 3-D benchmarks;
four video encoding programs;
one image rendering program;
two audio encoding and editing programs;
a file compression program;
three professional 3-D rendering applications;
a professional 3-D benchmark suite;
and two synthetic benchmarks for technical data.

We also describe the installation process for each program, followed by an explanation of the settings we chose. Finally, we conclude with a description of how we conduct our actual measurements.