Brent Justice Intro and GPU Review Format

Benchmarks

We want to involve our users by utilizing built-in game benchmarks that allows you to compare your results to ours.  It allows you, the end user, the one deciding if they should buy a new video card to test your current performance versus ours directly, apples-to-apples.  Let’s say we run the built-in benchmark in Far Cry 5.  It’s real-world gameplay, and you can run the exact same test and compare your performance with a new piece of hardware or video card we are reviewing and see how it compares.  It brings you into our reviews and now you are involved in the process.  You can make comparisons with us, determine what is best for you and get involved in the forums sharing your performance. 

We will use manual run-throughs in games that don’t have built-in benchmarks.  If the game has a built-in benchmark mode however, we will use it after verifying that it matches manual run-through performance.  We are going to make checks and balances to make sure it represents gameplay.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Synthetic benchmarks also have their place.  They aren’t the end all be all, but they are a tool, and can reveal useful information for someone making a buying decision.  We will demonstrate synthetic benchmarks on a single page – no more, no less.  You can easily skip that page if it isn’t your cup of tea, but we want to include it for those that do find it important.  We will strive to keep the synthetic benchmarks as game related as we can.  It is also on this page we can include GPGPU testing aspects of performance, such as OpenCL/CUDA performance.  Not everyone will find this useful, but for those that do, we want to include it, remember, everyone has different reasons for buying a video card.

Real World Gameplay Benchmarks

For those that are at this point and worried that we won’t focus on the gameplay experience, fear not.  We will also be doing game focused performance reviews.  In these game focused reviews we will relate the gaming experience to the gamer with different video cards.  We will test what the highest playable settings are in these reviews and give our recommendations on what settings you can use in the game on each video card. 

The gameplay performance reviews are a completely separate and different review than our video card specific reviews. 

One is focused on the game and gameplay performance, the other is focused on the hardware itself, the video card.  Two separate things, and both will be explored on our site. 

Reviewing a Comparison Card

In regards to our hardware, video card specific reviews we will also be doing single-card focused reviews.  This means we will be doing reviews of video cards, without comparison cards.  We are able to take this new review format and apply it to a single-video card review.  Instead of comparing performance between video cards, we can compare performance between resolutions in multiple games.  For example, we can take a GeForce RTX 2080 and show performance in 6-8 games and compare performance in each game apples-to-apples at 1080p, 1440p and 4K.  In this way you get a broad scope of performance the video card is capable of, and we focus completely on the card being reviewed. You can then see what its performance is like at multiple resolutions and make comparisons to your own system with the built-in game benchmarks.

This doesn’t mean we won’t ever have reviews without comparisons though.  We can take all that data and evaluate other video card for comparison later on, and make multiple articles comparing that one video card to many other video cards down the road.  It allows us a lot of flexibility and ways to re-use hardware to make new reviews from different perspectives as well as develop a database of performance you can look back on for comparisons.