BenchPair started from a simple annoyance. Search for a bottleneck calculator and you get a dozen sites that all return a single percentage from a formula none of them will show you. Feed them an absurd pairing and they return an equally confident number. There is no way to check whether any of it is true.
That number is also not actionable. Knowing you have a "23% bottleneck" tells you nothing about what to do next.
What we do differently
- We publish our method in full. The formula, the inputs, the calibration and the known limitations are all on the methodology page.
- We estimate a frame rate, not an invented percentage. A frame rate is something you can check against your own machine.
- We treat resolution properly. A pairing that is processor-limited at 1080p can be perfectly balanced at 4K, because rendering more pixels gives the graphics card more work but gives the processor none. Most calculators get this wrong.
- We account for the specific game. A competitive shooter and a flight simulator stress completely different parts of a machine.
- We tell you when an upgrade would not help. If your system is already balanced, we say so instead of recommending a purchase.
Where the data comes from
Every hardware figure in our database is a published manufacturer specification: shader counts, clock speeds, memory bandwidth, core counts, cache sizes and board power. These are sourced from Wikipedia under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence and cross-checked against vendor documentation.
We do not republish third-party benchmark scores. The performance model is ours, derived from those specifications, and documented so you can judge it.
What this is not
It is a well-reasoned estimate, not a measurement. Real performance varies with memory speed and timings, driver versions, cooling, background load, game patches and the specific scene being rendered. If you need exact numbers for your machine, run a benchmark on your machine.
We are also not affiliated with AMD, Intel or NVIDIA in any way. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Found something wrong?
We would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong. If a result contradicts measured data you have, tell us and include the numbers. That feedback is how the calibration improves.