Path of Exile community benchmarking project part 0: Measuring interest.

The problem

Path of exile, as many of us know, is an extremely demanding game when it comes to hardware. High tier content, even on high end hardware, can easily grind down to sub 30 fps, to the point that a slight upgrade can actually allow you to push into harder content, since you can react to what you may not have been able to before.

As such, it isn't inconceivable that some path of exile players wind up basing their hardware upgrade decisions on how it will help in this game. But, there has never really been much knowledge in terms of how much this or that part will actually affect the game. Whether the game favors a fast cpu or gpu, whether it prefers a cpu with more cores vs more single core speed, or more cache vs more clocks, etc.

The proposal

I'd like to propose a community effort to find a way to benchmark hardware in a consistent and repeatable manner, in a way representative of very high end gameplay, which can be used to give accurate info as to what potential upgrades would have the biggest impact, and how much impact these upgrades could have.

The questions

• Is this something people are interested in, and would it be useful?
• How should we go about doing this, do you have any ideas as for how to conduct a repeatable test? I have some ideas, which I will list below, so let me know if they may work, or if you have any other suggestions

The testing

What a potential benchmark must have

• Minimal barrier to entry- We need this to be something that anyone with a bit of time and currency can quickly do, without needing crazy gear or specific setups to do.
• Heavy enough load- If it doesn't actually stress the system enough, then it's not terribly useful. Nobody really cares what FPS you get sitting in hideout.
• Consistency- If there's a lot of variance or inconsistency in the test, you won't get very useful data out of it without spending an inordinate amount of time repeating tests, so it must be consistent.

So, what should we use? My though would be pvp. We have a standard setup for a target, and an attacker. While I'm not too familiar with pvp and can't confirm if this would work, I would suggest using some combination of a target with a bunch of minions, and an attacker using a setup that prevents them from killing these targets, while simultaneously hitting them a lot, to simulate hitting a ton of enemies at once, a-la high end gameplay. So like southbound on the attacker, with the target using purity of elements to prevent freeze. This should render them unkillable, unless they are hit with a dot like poison.

Any suggestions as for which skills to use, and how exactly to do this? For the target, maybe use animate weapon with full ele conversion and brutality to summon a pile of minions that will sit on the attacker, doing no damage. Then we find whatever skill can lag the most when hitting them, to test with.

TLDR

We test POE performance on different peoples' systems by having someone slap a pile of minions with southbound to lag everyone out, and measure how much POE cries.