Assassin’s Creed Valhalla isn’t as demanding as some other titles on this list, but it’s an excellent way to benchmark your PC. It has a built-in benchmark that produces consistent results, serving as a solid baseline that you can compare to other machines.

The game uses the now aging AnvilNext 2.0 engine. It’s capable of impressive visuals still — Valhalla is a beautiful game — but its not as demanding as some other engines. It’s consistent, and that’s what’s important. We’ve ran dozens of tests through Valhalla‘s built-in benchmark with only minor variations between trials.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has a built-in benchmark, too, but it’s much longer than Valhalla‘s. It provides an overview of sustained performance in a demanding title, stressing your CPU and GPU. In addition, it uses the Vulkan application programming interface (API) by default, serving as a change of pace from the DirectX APIs many games use.

This benchmark has a quirk, though. Instead of presets, Red Dead Redemption 2 has a performance slider that adjusts settings based on your hardware. For the best, most consistent results, we recommend cranking the slider to its max setting when running your first test.

Hitman 3 provides an interesting in-game benchmark. Instead of a set scene, the game loads you into the Dartmoor level with infinite ammo weapons and the option to spawn waves of guards. It’s a good way to press your CPU and GPU at the same time, with large, complex environments and dense A.I. on characters.

The Metro games have long stood as the titans of PC gaming benchmarks, and Metro Exodus is no different. Its graphics options don’t consider what people have, but rather what people could have in the future. It’s a taxing game with the latest Nvidia technologies, ultra-high-quality textures, and some intense lighting options, to boot.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is, like Metro Exodus, a game designed to take advantage of future hardware. It demands massive amount of video memory to stream in high-resolution textures, as well as many fast CPU cores as possible. In short, it hits on all fronts. The CPU handles all of the intricacies of a flight simulation, while the GPU is hard at work rendering the beautiful world.

Beyond your CPU and GPU, Microsoft Flight Simulator stresses every part of your system, down to your networking. While Metro Exodus and Control stress your GPU, and Hitman 3 and Civilization VI tax your CPU, Microsoft Flight Simulator does both, offering a good overview of system performance.

Keep in mind how demanding this game is, however. It will reveal bottlenecks in your system that otherwise wouldn’t show up in other games.

Civilization VI isn’t good for testing frame rates. It’s not very demanding, and it’s designed to scale down to low-end hardware. However, it’s great for benchmarking your CPU. Using the in-game benchmark, you can run a simulation of end-game turns and time how long it takes for those turns to complete.

This is useful for testing the speed of CPU cores. Overclocking a processor usually shows clear improvements in the turn time benchmark, showcasing the improvements in clock speed. If you want to sanity check that your overclock is actually improving your gaming performance, Civilization VI is a good benchmark to use.

Forza Horizon 4 is a stunning racing game, and it includes a dense in-game benchmark. The benchmark offers three different frame rate read-outs — GPU, CPU render, and CPU simulation. It also shows how much RAM and video memory the benchmark required, giving you an indication of if you can turn up your settings or not.

In addition to great insight into your performance, Forza Horizon 4 scales well across hardware. It was designed to run on everything from the base Xbox One to the Xbox Series X, after all. It shows clear steps between graphics cards as they climb in performance and price, offering a good indication of how your PC stacks up.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider includes a built-in benchmark that’s highly repeatable — similar to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Outside of being a pretty game that can tax high-end hardware, the built-in benchmark provides solid insights into performance, including CPU and GPU rendering times and 95% low frame rates.

It’s best as a DirectX 12 benchmark, however. Although you can run Shadow of the Tomb Raider with DirectX 11, the game shows noticeable performance improvements with the newer API. With DirectX 12 selected, Shadow of the Tomb Raider shows solid scaling across settings and hardware. That combination is hard to find, as most titles scale more toward settings or hardware.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is almost solely a CPU benchmark. Although a GPU benchmark is available, the main reason to use Ashes as a benchmark is that it can take advantage of a lot of cores. In early 2021, the developers updated the game to take advantage of up to 32 cores, which is far more than most games.

It likes a lot of fast cores, making Ashes is a great benchmark for testing not only your CPU’s clock speed, but also its core count. Outside of testing your processor, Ashes also includes some demanding graphics settings with the Crazy preset if you have a high-end GPU you want to stress.

Editors’ Recommendations