Finnish benchmarking company Basemark have today announced that they’re working with game technology house Crytek to produce a virtual reality specific benchmark to test how well your gaming hardware can handle the forthcoming consumer VR revolution.
Hot on the heels of Futuremark’s recent announcement that they’re due to step into the fledgling VR benchmark market, today Basemark and Crytek are announcing a joint partnership to deliver a benchmark capable of rating a system’s performance. In essence, “Can it run VR?”.
Developed on Crytek’s CRYENGINE technology, the engine behind the Crysis game franchise and the recently announced Robinson: The Journey VR game, will not only test your PC’s rendering mettle, it’ll also help suggest optimal graphical settings to improve your experience. Although, quite at what level (driver settings, game settings) or how this will work is not yet clear.
Crytek’s Creative Director for CRYENGINE, Frank Vitz, said: “Basemark is already helping to measure technology standards in other areas of gaming, and we’re thrilled to be partnering with them as we work to establish a user-friendly yardstick for VR performance. We believe CRYENGINE can become a go-to tool for developers looking to create compelling VR experiences, and this partnership means players can also count on CRYENGINE as they evaluate whether their PC is ready for the most advanced, cutting-edge VR content available.”
Basemark has partnered with TÜV Rheinland, a global testing giant with around 20k experts in 70 countries worldwide, to help design and deliver the metrics gathering processes.
The new benchmark differs from Futuremark’s forthcoming VRMark in that it will use a real world game engine, testing performance on a system that will actually support virtual reality titles in the future. Futuremark’s will be what’s known as a ‘synthetic’ benchmark, in that images are rendered using a proprietary system.
“We wanted to make a real-world VR gaming benchmark as opposed to a theoretical one and hence we’re very excited to announce this partnership with Crytek, the leading game engine PRESS RELEASE company”, said Tero Sarkkinen, founder and CEO of Basemark, “By using CRYENGINE as the base and vetting the test workloads under our rigorous development process involving all the key technology players, we will forge the definitive benchmark for all PC VR gamers.”
It must be stressed however that, although it’s certainly welcome to have a real game engine to run benchmarks on, it is only one engine. Games that run on competing engines such as Unity and Unreal won’t enjoy a 1:1 correlation with metrics gathered although of course if your system can run Basemark’s offering it’ll certainly be a good indicator.
Basemark ‘VR’ will come packaged in different guises, from feature-complete business oriented versions to the obligatory feature limited free user version. No prices have yet been announced however.
Those who wish to get involved in guiding the development of Basemark’s VR benchmark can also get involved in the company’s Development Program. If you’re interested in this, you can sign up for that initiative here.
There’ll be more information released as both companies begin to talk in more detail about the new VR benchmark at SIGGRAPH 2015 next week.