10 FREE Benchmarking Programs On Steam
This video covers ten completely free benchmarking programs available on Steam, plus a bonus tool at the end. If you want to test your system’s performance without spending anything, this list walks you through just about every option.
In this video, I’m going to show you ten programs you can use to benchmark your system – all of them free, and all of them available on Steam.
When using Steam, there are a handful of benchmarks that are fairly obvious to most people. Programs like 3DMark and PCMark may come to mind. However, digging a little deeper reveals that there are quite a lot more programs you can get for free that have at least some form of benchmarking capability.
I’m going to put the benchmarks in chronological order. This may also give you a rough estimate of which benchmarks may work well with your machine based on how old it is. So let’s get into it.
First up, we have Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Demo. This first‑person shooter from mid‑2007 had excellent graphics for its time and was known to work particularly well with NVIDIA hardware. It’s kind of like Starship Troopers in the snow. All in all, a great benchmark for testing older hardware.
For number two on our list, we have Just Cause 2 Demo. This massive open‑world adventure from 2010 still holds up well today. The benchmark offers a beautiful day‑and‑night terrain fly‑through, which is a great test for older systems. However, the benchmark did receive some criticism for being somewhat lighter on hardware requirements than the actual game.
At number three, we have Hard Reset Demo. This cyberpunk‑themed first‑person shooter from 2012 combines old‑school FPS action with more modern graphics. The benchmark offers a fairly short fly‑through of city streets littered with enemies, electrical fields, and explosions. It provides simple score results of minimum, maximum, and average FPS.
At number four, we have 3DMark Demo. You likely already know about this extremely popular benchmarking tool released in 2013. The demo version includes three different benchmarking tests: Fire Strike for DirectX 11 hardware, Night Raid for integrated graphics, and Time Spy for DirectX 12. This program goes into much more detail than the other benchmarks on the list. If you’re going to get any of these benchmarks, I would certainly recommend getting this one first.
For number five, we have the Resident Evil 6 Benchmark Tool. This third‑person survival shooter was released in early 2013. It’s a nice standalone benchmark tool that shows frame rates as well as an overall graded score at the end. Be warned, however: this benchmark is known to be more difficult to run than the actual game itself.
At number six is Star Swarm Stress Test. Released at the beginning of 2014, Star Swarm is a real‑time demo of the Nitrous game engine. The six‑minute benchmark depicts an epic battle between two space fleets, showing thousands of different units on the screen at one time.
For number seven, we have PCMark 10 Demo. This professional benchmarking tool is brought to you by the same company behind 3DMark. Unlike the other benchmarking tools on this list, which tend to skew more heavily toward graphics performance, PCMark attempts to measure performance for more business and productivity tasks. These include video editing, spreadsheets, web browsing, and video conferencing.
At number eight, we have Shadow of the Tomb Raider Trial. This beautiful open‑world adventure was released in late 2018. The benchmarking tool for this game is quite popular and has been one of the gold standards for GPU testing since it was first released. It also offers more detailed statistics beyond basic frame rate, which you don’t see with some of the other tools on the list. This one is highly recommended.
For number nine, we have Spaceship Visual Effect Graph Demo. Spaceship is a short technical benchmark released in October 2021. It’s meant to showcase some of the high‑end visual effects of the Unity game engine. The roughly three‑minute benchmark shows a first‑person view running through spaceship rooms, avoiding fires, and interacting with holographic terminals.
At number ten, we have Decay: Real‑Time Interactive Experience. Decay is a technology showcase for the Godot engine and was released in February 2022. The benchmark features a cinematic camera flying through a small city‑based environment and offers many graphic options that can be tweaked. You can also hit spacebar to take control of the camera and fly it around on your own.
Now, since you stuck through the entire list, we have a bonus benchmark for you:
War Thunder. This free‑to‑play military MMO was released in mid‑2013. The game includes an integrated benchmarking tool that allows you to pick from a dozen different versions of land, air, and sea maps at different times of day. It’s definitely a great free benchmarking resource. Just be warned, the download size is fairly substantial at nearly 39 GB.
So there you have it, eleven different free benchmarking programs you can download from Steam. I’ll include direct links to all of these programs below:
