There’s something so satisfying about performing your own PC stress tests; after all, benchmarking is a great tool for gaining insight into which games your rig can handle.
While there are plenty of websites and software dedicated to benchmark testing, most require you to spend money that’s better spent on actual video games.
A creative solution is to seek out games with the best built-in benchmarks and see how they perform on your gaming PC in real-time.
In this list, we’ll highlight the best games with built-in benchmarks in 2023, including free games with built-in benchmarks and paid ones you likely already own.
By the end, you should have more than enough games to choose from but we still encourage you to check back in the future as we continue to add new games!
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Free Games With Built-in Benchmarks
If you’re looking to benchmark your PC but don’t want to shell out any cash, then the following free games should do you just fine.
We’ve listed them in order of release year and linked to the Steam or homepage for their respective benchmarking tools.
We should point out that some games will require you to install the full game before accessing benchmarking options via a launcher or in-game menu.
Game | Release Year | Genre |
Bright Memory: Infinite | 2020 | Shooter |
Wiggly Boy | 2020 | Simulation |
Star Control Origins | 2019 | RPG |
Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers | 2019 | MMORPG |
World of Tanks enCore | 2018 | MMO |
Final Fantasy XV | 2018 | RPG |
Star Swarm | 2014 | Space Combat Sim |
War Thunder | 2013 | Flight Combat Sim |
Resident Evil 6 | 2013 | Shooter |
Note: Wiggly Boy isn’t technically free but instead costs $1.
Paid Games With Built-in Benchmarks
The rest of this list will primarily focus on more recent games with built-in benchmarking tools and games that frequently go on sale or are playable through gaming subscription services.
Remember, there’s no right or wrong game to use for benchmarking, but there are games with better built-in tools than others.
Lastly, before purchasing any of the following games, make sure your PC meets their minimum specification requirements.

Rainbow Six Extraction
Release Year: 2022
Genre: Shooter
Designed for 3-player co-op, Rainbox Six Extraction is a tactical FPS about fighting alien monsters and infiltrating their hideouts.
Like most PC shooters, it includes a built-in benchmarking tool that can be accessed by navigating to the Main Menu<Cog Icon<Options<Video<Benchmark.
From here, players can mess around with their video settings to improve performance and compare results from each test.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
Release Year: 2021
Genre: Action-adventure
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy offers a fresh take on the now-iconic band of misfit heroes as they travel across the cosmos stirring up trouble.
The game does a fine job balancing its story and gameplay while also offering one of the best built-in benchmarking tools in recent memory.
Once initiated, it will record one minute of gameplay in a market setting and record data regarding min/avg/max FPS and VRAM to share with you at the end.

Far Cry 6
Release Year: 2021
Genre: Shooter, Open-world
Fans of open-world games are likely to have played through at least one Far Cry game in their lifetime, including the most recent Far Cry 6.
Yara’s world is massive, ecologically diverse, and downright gorgeous to look at while traveling by boat, car, helicopter, and more as you wreak havoc on Castillo’s soldiers.
This makes it a great contender for PC benchmarking using a built-in tool located in the in-game menu by navigating to System<Options<Benchmark.

Forza Horizon 4
Release Year: 2018
Genre: Racing Sim
Forza Horizon 5 continues to be one of the best additions to the Xbox Game Pass library and serves as a reliable case study for conducting stress tests.
Building off of its predecessors, the game features a vast, fully-explorable open-world filled with gorgeous vistas, weather effects, and a wide selection of racing competitions.
These events provide the perfect opportunity to see what your gaming PC can do by running some performance tests using Forza Horizon 5’s built-in benchmarking tool.
Hitman 3
Release Year: 2021
Genres: Stealth, Action
Hitman 3’s benchmarking tool is a lot more user-friendly compared to previous installments and sees you loading into the second mission of the level Dartmoor.
Here, you can wreak havoc on the environment using weapons with infinite ammo as well as spawn in waves of guards by pressing an enticing big red button.
It’s an excellent showcase for Hitman 3’s engaging sandbox designs and gets at the heart of the fun of interacting with benchmarking tools.

Immortals Fenyx Rising
Release Year: 2020
Genre: RPG
Ubisoft is known to include benchmarking options in the majority of their games, including their latest Assassin’s-Creed-meets-Zelda open-world RPG, Immortals Fenyx Rising.
In it, you play as a hero who gets called upon by the Greek gods to defeat Typhon, a mighty Titan with an army of mythological monsters that have taken over the world.
While it’s highly stylized, cartoony visuals may not seem that technically demanding at first, the game’s graphics become strikingly detailed when running on High, Very High, and Ultra presets.
Additionally, it features a ton of settings to experiment with during stress tests, including depth of field, motion blur, and ambient occlusion.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Release Year: 2020
Genre: RPG
Assassin’s Creed games can always be relied on for performance testing, mainly because they’re usually very poorly optimized for PC, especially at launch.
Simultaneously, the series has offered consistently photorealistic graphics that continue to improve with each new installment, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Combine these two factors, and you have yourself the recipe for a handy benchmarking game that will look good and put your PC through the wringer.
It’s a testament to Ubisoft’s ability to turn ancient, sometimes even mythological, locations into immersive sandboxes that are only partially stifled by a few technical hiccups.

Borderlands 3
Release Year: 2020
Genre: Shooter, RPG
Although Borderlands 3’s unfriendly DRM can make it a pain to play casually, it’s beneficial for benchmark tests, especially if you want to see what your CPU can handle.
The game is set seven years after Borderlands 2 on the planet Pandora, a barren wasteland rumored to contain hidden vaults filled with treasure and advanced technology all throughout.
Like most modern PC releases, it includes several graphics presets tailored for low to high-end machines in addition to various sliders that allow you to optimize performance on your machine.
Lastly, since the game runs on Unreal Engine 4, it can support RTX-enabled GPUs and path tracing via Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing.

Watch Dogs: Legion
Release Year: 2020
Genre: Action-adventure
If Immortals’ hyper-stylized vistas aren’t cutting it, you may want to boot up another Ubisoft game that boasts ray-tracing support.
Watch Dogs: Legion has you attempting to liberate London from a corrupt private military group by recruiting playable NPCs with unique skills that allow them to infiltrate enemy HQs and cause mayhem.
Ubisoft really went out of its way to create a detailed recreation of modern-day London, complete with all of the puddles and wet surfaces you’d typically encounter in Big Ben’s home.
As a result, it ends up being the perfect showcase for RTX-enabled graphics cards that can squeeze out extra details from light and water reflections on cars, windows, and city streets.

F1 2020
Release Year: 2020
Genre: Racing Sim
It should be no surprise that racing games are actually great for benchmarking since they’re typically used for graphical showcases.
If you’re looking for a recent racing sim to run performance tests, F1 2020 is a good pick since it requires a reasonably powerful PC to run smoothly.
This mainly comes down to the game’s notoriously detailed physics engine and a wide selection of real-world tracks that have been masterfully recreated in-game.

Dirt 5
Release Year: 2020
Genre: Racing Sim
Dirt 5 is another racing sim with a built-in benchmarking tool that provides a detailed breakdown of the game’s performance based on three-minute blocks of gameplay.
Once the benchmarking test is complete, the evaluation summary gets saved as a separate file on your PC, allowing you to run multiple tests and compare each one.
While Dirt 5’s graphics may not be as visually-striking as F1 2020’s, the render quality of vehicles is relatively high compared to other games in the genre.
There are also environmental weather conditions to consider, such as raindrops, dirt, etc., which can impact performance.

Horizon Zero Dawn
Release Year: 2020
Genre: Action-adventure
Sony doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to porting over their first-party games, so it wasn’t surprising to see Horizon Zero Dawn launch in such a messy state on Steam.
Of course, this also makes it a suitable candidate for benchmark testing; after all, if your PC can run such a poorly optimized game with decent results, imagine what it can do with correctly formatted ones.
In it, you play as Aloy, an outsider with a mysterious past who tries to prove her worth by taming and defeating mechanical beasts.
While Sony has continued to push out updates to get the game running better, Horizon Zero Dawn will always be demanding, especially if you don’t have a newer graphics card.

Red Dead Redemption 2
Release Year: 2019
Genre: Action-adventure
Rockstar games don’t fare as well when it comes to their PC versions, with Red Dead Redemption 2 being the worst offender to date.
Despite offering hitchless performance on consoles, the PC port was ridden with bugs and plagued by performance issues that persisted even on high-end graphics cards.
While Rockstar has stepped things up in this regard, you’ll want to make sure your rig is up to snuff before venturing into Red Dead 2’s lovingly detailed open-world by running your own tests.
Red Dead 2 includes a surprisingly-detailed benchmark tool with a single caveat: it takes 5 minutes to perform a single test and even longer if you’ve got multiple GPUs at higher resolutions.

Metro Exodus
Release Year: 2019
Genre: Shooter
Leading up to its release, Metro Exodus was touted as one of the true next-gen experiences, which may not mean much to PC gamers but is a good indicator of the game’s technical prowess.
Considering you’ll need a reasonably beefy machine to get consistent fps, it’s also an ideal pick for benchmark testing.
In the graphics settings, you can find options for DirectX, gamma, motion blur, tessellation, texture filtering, and V-Sync, to name a few.
If you’re running an RTX-enabled GPU, this is the first game you should benchmark since it does a great job of showcasing the technology.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Release Year: 2018
Genre: Action-adventure
Along with Metro Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider has become one of the go-to games for benchmarking, mainly due to its lovingly detailed environments and atmospheric setting.
It also happens to include more comprehensive graphics options than previous games in the series, as well as a built-in benchmarking tool that analyzes three-minute blocks of gameplay.
While three-minute intervals are a bit overkill for benchmarking, the amount of info you get is worth the trouble of sitting through that much time.
Unlike many other built-in benchmarks, Shadow’s offers various camera perspectives and environment types to compare results using an fps chart, frame graphics, and a summarized report.

For Honor
Release Year: 2017
Genre: Fighting
Since many of Ubisoft’s games run on the same engine and include their own benchmarking tools, we thought we’d highlight one that often goes on sale.
For Honor is a third-person arena fighter in which you play as a Knight, Viking, or Samurai, and face-off against other players and AI enemies throughout various online modes.
The PC port is surprisingly well optimized and includes a hefty amount of graphics settings to mess around with, including texture filtering, dynamic reflections, and ambient occlusion.
Combine all this with action-packed multiplayer battles, and you have all the makings for a benchmark tester’s dream game.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Release Year: 2016
Genres: Shooter, RPG
Another benchmarking game that can be picked up for dirt cheap is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which sometimes goes on sale for as low as five bucks.
Aside from being well optimized for PC, it includes several graphical presets you can swap between and stress test using the game’s built-in benchmark tool.
The tool is hidden in the game’s Extras menu and records 90-second chunks of gameplay before analyzing the footage and presenting it to you as a detailed summary.

Grand Theft Auto V
Release Year: 2015
Genre: Action-adventure
Grand Theft Auto V’s benchmarking tool can be a bit of a hassle to use right out of the box since the game requires you to complete Franklin’s first story mission before it works properly.
However, once you’re able to access it, you’ll find there are a decent amount of graphics options you can tweak prior to initiating a stress test.
The benchmark offers five unique scenes throughout Los Santos’ open world that reflect actual gameplay scenarios.
Considering GTA games are very dynamic in weather, NPC behavior, traffic, etc., you’ll want to run several tests and calculate an average for the best results.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Release Year: 2014
Genre: Action-adventure
There’s a possibility you already own a copy of Shadow of Mordor either through a Humble Bundle or a random Steam sale bundle.
Even though it was released in 2014, the game is still one of the preferred titles for benchmarking and even comes with its own tool.
And since it’s a slightly older video game, your GPU stands a better chance of being able to run it on the highest settings.
Just remember to manually download and install the Shadow of Mordor texture package from Steam before using the Ultra preset; otherwise, you may run into some image errors.