A little bit about benchmarking

Today i will write about benchmarking as i promised before,,,

Benchmark is a process of determining the capacity of our system, in this writing, the system will be a computer, but actually it can be anything that could be measured.

Benchmarking in computer is mainly divided into three kind
1. Synthetic benchmarking
2. Game Benchmarking
3. Real World Benchmark

The most popular benchmark among that three is the synthetic benchmark. it also has a lot of variant. Synthetic benchmark is a benchmark taken with some benchmark software. The most popular software used for synthetic benchmarking are for example, 3DMark06, 3DMark Vantage, Sysmark, SiSoft Sandra, SuperPi, WinRAR, PC Wizard, HDTach, HDTune and etc. They all have different testing pattern and also different speciallity. 3DMark is a software for testing the capability of a graphic card to accelerate a game. It uses Graphic card the most beside of CPU. SuperPi is for testing CPU performance. It makes the CPU count the decimal place of Pi(22/7) until a certain digit, and it count the time needed to finish the calculation. In this case it determine the CPU performance in the relation with the processor cache. The shorter the time needed to finish the calculation, the better CPU it is. SiSoft Sandra is global tester for all the part of computer. It could also compare our result with the saved result of a lot of system. It could test the memory, the Hard disk, the Processor, and etc

Game benchmarking is now pretty popular since new game require a lot of resource and better system. For example, F.E.A.R, Quake 4, Crysis, Company of Heroes and etc. They have a benchmarking system that provided to test how far our system can run the game. Crysis have two benchmark in the game. One is the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) benchmark and the other is the CPU benchmark. The GPU benchmark is mainly benchmark the GPU, how can it shader the object, how far could the GPU maintain the frame rate. Generally the result for GPU benchmarking is shown in FPS (Frame per Second) or most well known as frame rate. The higher the Frame rate, the smoother the display, and the better we play a game.

Now we come to the last main kind of benchmark, the real world benchmark. This benchmark complete the other two benchmark. A benchmark is not more than simulation, and a simulation is never the same as the real one. Then to proof the simulation, we need to use it, and feel ourself the performance. This benchmark discussed a lot for its subjectives. The benchmark is depend on who held the benchmark, so this benchmark result is not very comparable but still important to complete the other two benchmark.

So the benchmark is only a simulation, but from that simulation, we can predict the performance and the capacity of our system but still cannot predict the reliability of our system. There's some product that is optimized for benchmarking, so that the performance in the benchmark process and the real world process will be different. There also a product that is not having a good result in benchmark but has a good performance in the real usage. This mean that synthetic benchmark and the game benchmark need the real world benchmark to complete the result.