The best games to benchmark new gaming PCs

1. Cyberpunk 2077

https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1091500/

CD Projekt RED's RPG tops the list if you want to really stress test your gaming PC. Cyberpunk 2077 didn't launch in its most optimal state in 2020, but several years later, the release of the Phantom Liberty DLC has now made it one of the most graphically advanced experiences on PC.

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Whether you enable Cyberpunk 2077's Path Tracing mode or make do with the Ray Tracing preset settings, this game won't hinder anything. The PC needs to be very powerful to experience the game and all its fancy features. Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR will help restore some of the FPS lost due to Ray Tracing.

The game is known to have 90% CPU utilization, even on an 8-core CPU. A 6-core CPU may not be enough to maximize this visual masterpiece.

2. Alan Wake 2

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/alan-wake-2

If there's anything that can make PC gaming "harder" than Cyberpunk 2077, it's Remedy's latest title, Alan Wake 2. The long-awaited sequel to the 2010 horror game and the new Remedy's ever-expanding universe takes gaming graphics to the next level with Path Tracing. It's also the first game to use mesh shaders instead of traditional vertex shaders, so it performs poorly on anything other than the best graphics cards available today.

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Even the RTX 4090 struggled to maintain playable frame rates without any help from upscaling, with all settings set to 4K resolution. The game was developed with Ray Tracing in mind from the beginning and needed powerful hardware to express it to its fullest. If your gaming PC can play Alan Wake 2 at over 60 FPS then it can play every other game.

3. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1774580/STAR_WARS_Jedi_Survivor/

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor may have been notorious for its terrible optimization on PC, stuttering issues, poor performance even on recommended hardware – but it's a beautiful game. It requires a fairly powerful system to run at maximum settings.

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Recommended graphics cards for this game are RTX 2070 and RX 6700 High quality images at 4K resolution and highest settings. If your gaming PC is powerful enough to force games to run smoothly, you can rest assured when playing other games.

4. Metro Exodus

https://store.steampowered.com/app/412020/Metro_Exodus/

If you are a lover of the survival game genre, you probably already know Metro Exodus. The third and final entry in the Metro series, the post-apocalyptic first-person shooter featured stunning graphics when it first launched in 2019. An enhanced version came out two years later and brings Ray Tracing and Global illumination to the game's already beautiful world.

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While it's possible to run the game well on an RTX 2070 or RX 6700 XT, it'll take a high-end GPU to really improve things. Whether it's the realistic lights and shadows or the mesmerizing environments, Metro Exodus is one of the games with the best story, and is a great benchmark tool for your gaming PC.

5. Red Dead Redemption 2

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1174180/Red_Dead_Redemption_2/

Rockstar's ability to create immersive open worlds is widely known, and Red Dead Redemption 2 is perhaps the studio's best achievement to date (at least until GTA VI comes out). The game has incredible storytelling, a perfectly rendered open world, and immersive gameplay. RDR2 is not only one of the best PlayStation games but also one of the most popular titles for benchmarking gaming PCs.

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For a game that's over 5 years old, it looks incredibly realistic. Even without any Ray Tracing features, it's still capable of pushing fairly capable gaming PCs to their limits. You can run it on a cheap graphics card at the lowest settings, but to truly experience the incredible lighting and textures, a modern high-end GPU is required.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 06 June 2024