Quote Originally Posted by Russian View Post
We never run gaming "benchmarks" its more effective and realistic if you just run the actual game in a certain level and just take the statistics from that run rather than running a canned benchmark. The only reason we even run benchmarks that are usually considered synthetic is only to allow consumers to quantitatively compare against other synthetic benchmarks but in no way accurately reflects real world performance. My point of view is that real world performance results are more important than any 3DMark score when it comes to a product review.
I agree. One of the main problems is consistency when it comes to actual gameplay versus some of the built-in / stand along rolling benchmarks. The vast majority of the time they do give reviewers a quick way to benchmark a game but for the most part they are inaccurate.

I have also seen talk (and I'm not sure where it stems from) that timedemos don't allow for accurate results. There weren't too many games to test this out with but from what I have seen, timedemos are actually an excellent way to benchmark.

It all comes down to knowledge of a game. Just loading up a built-in benchmark without know if it is accurate or not is a surefire way to come up with the wrong conclusion.