Ignore Average FPS and watch the benchmark tool actually run

I see so much digital ink being spilled about how the tool "isn't a fair test" because a lot of it is cutscene. Setting aside the fact that the cutscene is in-engine and not pre-rendered, let's acknowledge something: Average FPS is not a useful metric. You don't care how many frames you get overall, you care about the minimums, about how the game performs under stress. It would be nice if the tool instead reported minimums, or broke down FPS by different segments.

However, in terms of actually testing the performance of the machine, the benchmark tool does a pretty good job. We see:

• Both cutscene and regular gameplay
• A weather transition
• Loading in an extremely large vista
• A group of monsters fighting, including a fairly visually-intense sand effect
• A town segment with dozens of simultaneously loaded actors

While it would've been nice to also maybe see a little bit of player/monster combat, or some of the more visually intensive Arkveld attacks, it's otherwise a pretty solid cross-section of the different parts of the game likely to tax your hardware.

So, how do you use the tool? Watch it actually run through these parts. See how the FPS does when it has to render a big sand attack or an entire town. Or, better yet, ignore the FPS entirely and just look at the action with your eyes and decide if it looks good or not.

I know this is the internet where it's fun to get outraged, and Capcom is certainly no saint, but I don't think they're trying to trick anyone - the benchmarking tool is a genuinely wonderful feature that gives everyone a chance to try before they buy. So many of the complaints I see about it really seem to miss the point of how the tool should be used.