Thiago Trevisan/IDGĪ custom liquid-cooled GPU setup created by the author.Ī good example of recent issues have been in the GDDR6X memory temperatures of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition. If your GPU quickly reaches its maximum temperature limit, it could indicate a rare (but possible) issue with its thermal paste, or (more likely) restricted airflow in your case if there isn’t enough clearance for the fans to get cool air. The first vital is temperature, which can indicate various potential issues with your hardware and case airflow. If all looks good, you’ll also want to keep an eye on the vitals, Those will be displayed in the top right corner, along with your GPU info. The first order of business here is to make sure your graphics card can run without shutting down or displaying any weird graphical glitches, so you should allow it to run Heaven for at least 30 minutes, to allow the GPU to get up to temperature.
It’s free for personal use and runs a loop of a graphical environment that really utilizes your GPU. The first program we’re going to use is Unigine Heaven 4.0. That can mean a dead card, but in many cases you’ll get what are called “artifacts”-basically imperfections on the image, flickering, or even pulsating colors. It’s rare, but sometimes a graphics card can be defective from the factory. Now that you know why you should benchmark, it’s time to get into the how. To check for stability and other vitals like thermals, clock speeds, etc.įirst, test for stability and temperatures Thiago Trevisan/IDG.How much performance will you gain by buying a new graphics card? Now you’ll know! To be able to compare your current PC’s performance against your future hardware upgrades.To get a baseline performance metric so that you know if your GPU is performing as it should by comparing to other standard results.First, though, here’s why you should be benchmarking your graphics card even if you aren’t trying to make it to the top of the competitive overclocking charts: