Game-related benchmarks

The synthetics

3DMark 11 and Vantage are useful tests to track changes within the same system and they are often used to give a rough comparison between platforms.

Vantage

First up we look at Vantage on the HDD using our GTX 670 and i7-3770K at stock speeds. Looking carefully at each of the runs; all drives fall within a very small margin of error.

Here is the chart.

There is no performance difference running a SSD or a HDD for Vantage.  For the record, the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro6G 240GB SSD scores the highest; 401 points higher out of nearly 31,000 points.

Now let’s look at 3D Mark 11.

3D Mark 11

Now lets check out the score with the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro6G 240GB SSD:

Here is the chart of our results:

There is no difference running a HDD or a SSD. Let’s look at Heaven Benchmark and Crysis to see if there is any difference in frame rates between SSD and HDD.

Heaven 3.0 & Crysis framerates

We run Crysis at 1920×1080 on Very High setting with 4xAA/16xAF. Heaven 3.0 is run as below on all 5 of our drives. Everything is at identical settings under the same conditions:

We compare identical runs and chart the result:

No difference outside of benchmarking “noise”.  We do not find the o.35 fps varience in the frame rates in Heaven to be significant.  The Crysis result is certainly less than 3% difference but it bears further investigation as the OWC SSD  is slightly faster than the pack.  This week, ABT is looking at frame times and frame rate comparisons and we will again attempt to determine if there is any difference in gaming performance by using a faster SSD over a slower one or a HDD.

Now we will look at three new very practical tests for gamers.