Windows 7: Inside the second: Gaming performance with today's CPUs

As you may know, a while back, we came to some difficult realizations about the validity of our methods for testing PC gaming performance. In my article Inside the second: A new look at game benchmarking, we explained why the widely used frames-per-second averages tend to obscure some of the most important information about how smoothly a game plays on a given system. In a nutshell, the problem is that FPS averages summarize performance over a relatively long span of time. It's quite possible to have lots of slowdowns and performance hiccups during the period in question and still end up with an average frame rate that seems quite good. In other words, the FPS averages we (and everyone else) had been dishing out to readers for years weren't very helpful—and were potentially misleading.