soap buy a Radeon 7770 for example. This
is all I can afford, but if that purchase has
gained me access to a competition where I
may win a Radeon 290. Chances are I would
be more than willing to participate in it, with
just the system I have and the one I use to
play games. That is at home however, in
terms of live competition there’s an even
more organic way to engage people.
We should have, at this time, discarded
our inherent reliance on fixed synthetic
benchmarks. This is not to undermine the
often impressive work that Futuremark and
others have done. It is however saying that,
the tie in between the “regular” enthusiast
and competitive overclockers must be
strengthened by way of more relevant
application benchmarks. Several games
at present include built in benchmarks,
why not have those as the applications with
which performance is measured? At a live
event, this is far more engaging and even
for spectators, they are more than likely to
be familiar with the performance of a game
rather than 3DMark FireStrike Ultra. How
many of us know what a Radeon 280 scores
in that benchmark for example? I would
wager that very few people do. Even if we
were to use such a benchmark, its staccato
frame rate is anything but impressive
or appealing to anyone. It is not a great
showing for the hardware and perhaps even
the benchmark itself.
Contrast that with the fly-through
benchmark of Hitman: Absolution, BioShock
Infinite or any other “triple A”. Artistically
these are more appealing, likely to be
familiar and they have a direct relevance
to what most people do who are at these
competitions as spectators. If to an
audience member, they are able to witness
a particular game benchmark showing
a frame rate of 46, instead of what they
experience at home at 32 with lower image
quality. It is direct way of incentivizing that
individual to buy that particular graphics
card. We may and always do appreciate
ever increasing 3DMark scores, but there’s
hardly anyone who knows what a good
3DMark score is for instance.
What does 3,000 points in 3DMark
FireStrike mean? What games does that
play and at what quality? It’s a number, but
it is meaningless in isolation. Yet a frame
rate is something nearly everybody can
relate to. There are plenty of opportunities
afforded by a slight adjustment in how we
as a community, vendors and all involved
presently in overclocking deal with the
larger computing space. To those within the
industry we by and large understand why
overclocking at a competitive level matters.
This is either as a necessary undertaking
for the purpose of selling components, or
to a lesser degree an opportunity to refine
future components through user feedback
Issue 32 | 2014 The OverClocker 21