Value proposition of adding an Ashes benchmark.

Nerror

Most hardware reviewers on Youtube and other sites tend to use the same bunch of games for benchmarking new and old hardware. Some are chosen due to popularity, and some are likely chosen based on the technical aspects of the game. It's basically free advertisement for those games.

If Intrepid is able to create a good benchmark that really shows off the world, including large siege battles of 500+ characters and using all the best UE5 technologies, I think they stand a really good chance of being picked up as part of the standard benchmarking package that all the big names use to review hardware. That is good for Intrepid's bottom line.

The value for us players is a great benchmark to tweak our settings in a controlled environment, so we don't have to figure it all out mid-siege through trial and error. To me that's just good customer service. As an added bonus, we're likely to receive more frequent and better driver updates and fixes from the GPU manufacturers if it's a benchmark the reviewers often use, because that helps the manufacturers to sell more GPUs.

There is obviously a chance an Ashes benchmark won't be picked up by the large hardware review sites, in which case the value proposition mainly goes to their existing customers and people who already know about the game, but want to see if their potato PC can run it first.

It would make most sense if the benchmark can be run from the launcher directly, without needing an active subscription.

What I don't know is how big an endeavour it is to create a such benchmark. I am guessing it's not trivial, but not super costly either, since they'll already have all the game assets.

Thoughts?

Ludullu

Pair that bad boi with the character creator and you have yourself a perfect advertising tool, that also serves as a way for people to know if their PC can run the game w/o buying it (that is, if the CC is free?).