MSI Afterburner and How to Benchmark EVERY game with it
MSI Afterburner and How to Benchmark EVERY game with it. You have to benchmark games! Why? You want to get more FPS out of your favourite PC game, right? Then you have to benchmark first, tweak either in-game graphic settings or overclock CPU and GPU, then benchmark again, tweak some more, benchmark again… you get the idea.
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So, how do you benchmark your favourite game if it has no implemented benchmark? Just follow along and use the MSI Afterburner (https://www.msi.com/Landing/afterburner) and its included benchmarking capabilities and learn what you should and shouldn't do while benchmarking.
After downloading, installing and launching MSI Afterburner, you want to click on the little gear icon to open up the properties.
Next, look for the benchmark tab.
When it comes to the hot keys you should choose something that is usually not a general shortcut. I chose Alt+Q and Alt+W.
Right below the hot keys the results file location Is shown. You can obviously select the different directory. By default, it is placed within the installation folder. No worries though, you can directly open it by clicking on the view button.
By default, Afterburner will append new benchmark results in the existing .txt file. That is helpful for comparison runs. If you don't want that, just tick the box in front of "recreate existing benchmark results files".
Before you start your benchmarking session, a common error happens when the riva tuner statistics server, is installed alongside MSI Afterburner and has the application detection level set to "none". If that is the case, benchmarking won't work most of the time. So make sure it is at least set to low.
Now let’s get to benchmarking.
Fire up your favourite game, and simply play like you normally would. It is recommended to play at least a couple of minutes, 5 should be sufficient to get a reliable result that averages out unique FPS highs and lows. The 0.1% and 1% low frame rate are a good indicator for your system's performance in that particular game. The average FPS is the one you want to-increase the most or rather eyeball at first.
There will always be situations in games where the frame rate drops, sometimes dramatically, either due to massive explosions, lots of characters being rendered and so forth. Or maybe your PC is doing something in the background that is simply a Rare occurrence. So don't be too fixated on the low FPS.
Now that you have a reliable baseline you can get to tweak. You can either tweak the graphics settings in-game or overclock system components, if you're comfortable with that. Make sure that you have a comparable game situation each time you benchmark. I benchmarked Assassin's Creed Valhalla twice with roughly the same path I climbed and sprinted. Once with a silent and undervolted GPU-setting and once after doing an overclock to my faithful GTX 1080. I gained roughly 30% more on the average frame rate.
So this is how you benchmark your favourite game using MSI Afterburner. Like this video if you like it, subscribe to have the channel, and we will see you next one.