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Our favorite benchmarks for testing PCs and how to use them

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When The Verge runs reviews of laptops (and occasionally phones), they are invariably benchmarked in order to measure various aspects of a PC’s performance. However, benchmarks are not just used by product reviewers. They can help all of us in a variety of ways.

Benchmarks can let you know if (and perhaps even why) a new PC will measure up to your old one. They can help you figure out why your current PC is stuttering during your favorite game. They can let you know whether your current setup can handle the latest and greatest game or whether you’d better start thinking about upgrading. And they can help you decide what you should upgrade — do you need more memory or would a better graphics card do the trick?

The Verge’s premier PC reviewer, Monica Chin, is an expert in all sorts of benchmarks, and she has written a series of articles describing what each benchmark measures and how you can use it to assess your own computer system. Take a look and see how you can become your own best technical diagnostician.

  • Monica Chin

    Jun 27, 2022

    Monica Chin

    How to run PugetBench for After Effects

    A screenshot of PugetBench for After Effects running on macOS.
    It’s not one of the prettier benchmarks to be sure.

    Over the past few weeks, we’ve been showing you how you can run some of the benchmarks that we run in our laptop reviews to see how well your PC stacks up to others on the market. Today, we’re looking at PugetBench for After Effects, created by the PC manufacturer Puget Systems, which will measure how well your computer can handle VFX and graphics work.

    It’s important to note that this benchmark is still in beta. It is a bit more glitchy than some of the other Puget benchmarks (including the one for Photoshop, which we talked about earlier). If you’re running into problems, Puget Systems has a long list of troubleshooting steps to try. It’s doubly important that you don’t use the system (even bump the mouse) while PugetBench for After Effects is running — this can break the benchmark and force you to start over.

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  • Monica Chin

    Jun 17, 2022

    Monica Chin

    How to run PugetBench for Photoshop

    A screenshot of PugetBench for Photoshop running in Photoshop.
    You can do it in just a couple minutes.

    Puget Systems offers a number of different benchmarks to test out your PC using automated real-world tasks in the Adobe Creative Cloud. Some of them (such as the one for Premiere Pro) are somewhat complicated and can take a while to get up and running. But one of them — PugetBench for Photoshop — is very simple.

    PugetBench for Photoshop measures how fast your computer can perform various tasks, including mask refinement and gradients as well as filter tasks like lens correction and noise reduction. Unlike some of Puget’s other benchmarks, the Photoshop benchmark only requires one quick plug-in to set up.

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  • Monica Chin

    May 17, 2022

    Monica Chin

    How to run the FPS Benchmark for CS:GO

    Unlike many of the games we use to test gaming laptops here at The Verge, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead Redemption 2, CS:GO doesn’t have a built-in benchmark. But not to worry — there are third-party benchmarks you can run to see what kind of frame rates your device puts up on this first-person shooter. The one we commonly use, the FPS Benchmark by Ulletical, is free and easy to install.

    Here’s how to run Ulletical’s FPS Benchmark for CS:GO:

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  • Monica Chin

    Apr 29, 2022

    Monica Chin

    How to run the Red Dead Redemption 2 benchmark

    Screenshot of the Red Dead Redemption 2 home screen.
    This is another good benchmark to run

    One of the games we often use to test gaming laptops and PCs here at The Verge is Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s a popular, demanding game that includes a wide range of effects and scenery, from snowy blizzards to sandy roads and dynamic gunfights. Its benchmark is easy to use and can help you see how well your PC can run demanding games and which settings it can handle.

    First, you need to get the game if you don’t already have it. To do that:

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  • Monica Chin

    Apr 7, 2022

    Monica Chin

    How to run the PugetBench benchmark for Adobe Premiere Pro

    If you’re currently a video creator or are interested in trying it out, you may want to know how well your PC can perform various tasks in Adobe Premiere Pro. One of the best ways to do that is the Puget Systems benchmark for Premiere Pro.

    Puget Systems is a PC manufacturer that specializes in professional workstations. They offer a number of different benchmarks for testing hardware in a variety of applications, but the Premiere Pro benchmark is the one we use the most. It will have your computer try all kinds of things, including live playback, export, GPU effects, and CPU effects, and see how it stacks up to the competition. While there are many benchmarks that try to simulate a professional video workflow, this one gathers data from actual real-world use.

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  • Monica Chin

    Mar 30, 2022

    Monica Chin

    How to run the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark

    Shadow of the Tomb Raider
    This could be you.

    If you’ve just acquired a new game and you’re not sure what settings or resolution your PC can run it at without stutter and lag, a benchmark is a good way to try out various profiles before you dive in. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one title with a built-in benchmark that’s easy to run.

    This benchmark is also a very common test that reviewers run on laptops to put their GPUs to the test. Shadow of the Tomb Raider has ray tracing, so it’s a particularly good way to see how well a gaming rig can handle ray tracing. If you want to see how your GPU stacks up to other systems around the internet, the Tomb Raider benchmark is one of the best ways to do that.

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  • Monica Chin

    Mar 28, 2022

    Monica Chin

    How to run Geekbench on your phone or PC

    For the next few weeks, we’re showing you how to run various commonly used benchmarks on your PC. Reviewers like myself find these very helpful in comparing laptops we test to each other. But you don’t have to rely on us — you can easily run these benchmarks yourself on your own PC. Geekbench is one of the easiest and fastest ones to run and will show you how your device stacks up against the competition in a few key areas.

    Within Geekbench 5 (the latest release), there are a few different tests you can run. Geekbench CPU measures your processor’s performance, simulating both single-core and multi-core usage scenarios. When the test is complete, you’ll get both a single-core and a multi-core score. Geekbench Compute, by contrast, evaluates GPU performance, simulating workloads like image processing, computer vision, and machine learning. Together, these three scores can give you an idea of where your device is strong and where it’s weak.

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  • Monica Chin

    Mar 18, 2022

    Monica Chin

    How to run Cinebench to test your PC

    We here at The Verge use benchmark utilities a lot to compare computers to each other and figure out which ones are the most powerful. But that’s not their only purpose. You may also want to run them just to see how your own PC stacks up to the competition and make sure it’s running as well as it’s supposed to.

    One of the easiest utilities for beginners to run is Cinebench R23. This program uses your CPU to render a 3D image and evaluates how well it does that. It’s free and only takes 10 minutes to run.

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