ExtremeTech, a Ziff Davis subsidiary hardware website, together with Gas Powered Games and Microsoft today announced the availability of a benchmarking add-on for Dungeon Siege. he benchmark is a rolling demo in which the game is actually playing itself as a character runs through various aspects of the world. Note that during the benchmark run, AI is active and large amounts of world data are streaming through your system. Dungeon Siege scales with CPU, memory and graphics capabilities, making it a good system test -- but it will also scale well if you vary single subsystems (eg, changing out graphics cards or varying resolutions.) "When Chris Taylor described Dungeon Siege's unique architecture to me, I knew it would make an excellent stress test for PC systems and graphics card," noted ExtremeTech's Loyd Case. "We worked with the Dungeon Siege team, supplying them with the main spec. They did a great job of turning that spec into a great benchmark. We'll be using it as a key component of our 3D GameGauge 3.0 benchmark." Download Dungeon Siege Benchmark | 5Mbyte - Please note that need to have the full version of the game installed on your PC and have disk 1 in drive. Source: Activewin Further information The installer installs two new files: Benchmark.dsres in the Dungeon Siege resources folder BenchmarkMap.dsmap in the maps directory Those are the only changes made to the default Dungeon Siege installation. Note that if you try to connect with another retail version of the game that does not have the benchmark installed, you won't be able to connect due to a version mismatch. If you want to play multiplayer, either all installations must have the benchmark installed or none do. However, it's easy to revert to the original installation: just move Benchmark.dsres and BenchmarkMap.dsmap into folders outside the Dungeon Siege main folder. Running the Benchmark Note: Pressing 'ESC' at any time during the Benchmark will invalidate the results, and will result in a blank screen for upwards of 45 seconds while the sequence resolves itself. The computer may be unresponsive during this time. The easiest way is to create a shortcut from the original Dungeon Siege shortcut on the desktop. Add the following parameters to the end of the target line: fullscreen=true demo=true map=benchmark_demo teleport=island fpslog=true minfps=0 This is the base set of parameters, and will run the benchmark at whatever resolution you may have chosen from the main menu. You can actually run the benchmark at any resolution and either 16-bit or 32-bit color depths you wish from the shortcut. To do this, add height=, width= and bpp= to the end of the shortcut. You can also disable vsync for the game from the command line. For example, to run at 1280x1024, 16-bit color, with vsync disabled, you would add the following to the command line or shortcut target: Fullscreen=true demo=true map=benchmark_demo teleport=island fpslog=true minfps=0 height=1280 width=1024 bpp=16 vsync=false Other useful command line parameters are listed in the Dungeon Siege readme file. Results Results are written to a file in a file called fps.log, which is placed in the main Dungeon Siege folder. Note that the results of multiple runs are appended, so you can keep track of multiple runs easily.