The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Publisher: Bethesda

From our The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim review:

'It’s like watching Star Wars and genuinely thinking, ‘what about those poor Death Star construction workers?’ You’re missing the point: Skyrim is a huge and engaging world to explore and it treats you with great moments, from your first dragon encounter to finally being able to craft dwarven armour.'

We've updated our Skyrim benchmark to include the official high resolution texture pack, available as a free DLC. We set the game to its 'Ultra' setting and record a sixty second manual play through just outside the town of Whiterun during a thunderstorm. We use a section where we are able to run forward in a straight line for a minute without being attacked so the benchmark remains consistent, and use the third person camera view.

Many modern games make little use of the CPU, instead ploughing resources into the GPU, making the CPU’s impact on high-resolution performance difficult to test. As such, we’ve drafted in the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, one of the easier games in our 3D benchmark suite, as well as a GeForce GTX 680 2GB to remove as many of the graphical limitations as possible. We’ve still tested at a meaningful resolution however, and with ultra-detail and high-resolution textures (although no AA).

Battlefield 4

Publisher: EA

From our Battlefield 4 review:

'From the start to the end of the campaign you literally have no idea who’s who, why they do or don’t like each other and even what part you play in the whole thing – the latter point not being helped by the fact you’re mute throughout the whole game. You just meander from mission to mission and get on with the task set before you.

Still: who cares, right? Battlefield has long been about its multiplayer, and sure enough here, again the game truly shines. Largely it’s a continuation of what came before but there are enough extras that it feels, if not totally new, different enough to learn all over again.'

With its demanding Frostbite 3 engine, Battlefield 4 is a tough challenge for any GPU. We run the game at its highest 'Ultra' settings with motion blur at 50 percent and the resolution scale at 100 percent. We also manually disable MSAA. We run a 60 second benchmark on the game's sixth campaign level, Tashgar, during the on rails section at the level's start, and begin the recording as soon as the subtitle for the first line of dialogue appears on screen.