I just got my new PC up and running, and would like to give it a speed test. Does anyone know which of todays games has the sickest graphic? Something that will make most vanilla PC's squabble in pain?

Maybe try this one?

It might not quite be state of the art, but it's free and it gets my PC worked up even at medium settings. Maybe yours can run it smoothly at full, maxed-out settings?

I'd say probably Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux would give any high end PC a run for its money because even before the revamped versions these games still pushed PCs to their limits on the highest settings. Also you can try running The Witcher 2 with ubersampling turned on and check for a consistent frame rate. There is also the new Tomb Raider game that uses Tress FX for shampoo commercial like hair affects on Lara that requires an AMD GPU though, but still hugely impacts performance.

Tress FX isn't exclusive to AMD GPU's, it was that way until patched to work with Nvidia shortly after release.


To OP:

The new Metro redux games seem to be the best candidates for that right now but if you really want to push it to it's very limits then a heavily modded Skyrim will make any computer scream.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

...probably this one... :D THAT is a great game.

I've always imagined a weird circle when it comes to better and better graphics - they'll end up so life-like we may as well go back to using FMV!

Battlefield 4 is also pretty hard to run with everything maxed out at a smooth framerate.

I guess Skyrim on Ultra High settings with the HD texture pack and one of the overpowered ENBs and tree/grass/water overhaul mods would do the trick.

I'm not sure if an overpowered computer would actually accomplish this, but you could always try to run Gothic 3 lag and stutter free (on any settings).

Witcher 2 is still one of the best looking games around. Crysis games, even if they aren't that good. Sleeping Dogs was pretty damn impressive.

Sleeping Dogs is definitely one of (if not THE) best looking games ever (especially when it rains), but it's actually not that demanding, surprisingly. I run it on medium-high graphics with HD textures using a mid-range laptop (with Intel integrated graphics) and it doesn't lag/stutter and it doesn't make my laptop run hot either. I'm not sure if it's the engine they built for it or just programming prowess but kudos to the developers for making it so well optimized.

Edit: and yeah, good call on The Witcher 2. I tried it a few days ago and even on low settings it lagged a bit.

Psychonauts?