PCMark 10 Extended

With the PCMark 10 benchmark doing a very good job and being offered at no cost, how does Futuremark get you to pay for the Advanced Edition? Sure, local storage and custom runs are neat, but are they $29.99 amounts of neat? No? Well, what about adding a gaming benchmark then? Thus, we finally get to the most complete benchmark in PCMark 10, which has something for everyone - office workers, professionals, and gamers alike.

Fire Strike runs in windowed mode using a single GPU only, and the score is scaled differently from the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark, so the two scores are not comparable. This also means that if you have more than a GPU in your system, all but one are there to merely spectate the show. That said, the Fire Strike test has the same subtests - Graphics test 1, Graphics test 2, Physics test, and Combined test. So let us take a look at these in more detail now that we have covered the other three test groups.

Graphics Test 1

Fire Strike's Graphics test 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with multiple particles being drawn at half their original resolution and dynamic particle illumination being disabled. The scene involves 100 separate shadow-casting spot lights, and 140 non-shadow-casting point lights, with millions of processing operations being conducted in each frame, including tessellation and compute shader invocation.

Graphics Test 2

This test focuses on the particles themselves, as well as GPU simulations. Here, the particles are drawn at full resolution and dynamic particle illumination is enabled. The GPU simulates two separate smoke fields as well. To balance the load on the system, "only" six shadow-casting spot lights and 65 non-shadow-casting point lights are present. A similar number of processing operations are conducted here, with some involving depth of field effects as well as particle and fluid (smoke) simulations.

Physics Test

This test is all about the CPU, with GPU load kept as low as possible. Gameplay physics simulations are run on the CPU directly using the open source Bullet Physics Library. A total of thirty-two different worlds are simulated here, with one thread per CPU core used. Intel Hyperthreading and AMD Simultaneous MultiThreading thus take a back seat here.

Combined Test

Easily the most strenuous test in PCMark 10, the Fire Strike Combined test loads the CPU and a single GPU simultaneously using elements from the previous three tests. The GPU load is a combination of tessellation, volumetric illumination, fluid and particle simulation, FFT bloom and depth of field effects, whereas the CPU load is from the rigid body physics of the various statues breaking in the background.

The nine test routines in the four test groups thus all have an individual score, and the test group scores are calculated as described in the technical guide. The PCMark 10 score is thus calculated as: Score = K * geomean (Se,Sp,Sd,Sg) where K= 0.780 (which scales the score to 5000 on the reference PC); Se = Essentials group score; Sp = Productivity group score; Sd = DCC group score; Sg = Gaming group score.