Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation earns its place by being the light end of the ladder, and by being ruthlessly repeatable. The benchmark is a flythrough you start from the command line - no menu, no input, nobody steering - and it writes its own CSV with a per-scene breakdown and a summary before closing itself. Five scenes, same path every time.

Do not mistake it for a stress test. It is a 2014 engine and it will not trouble a modern GPU: our Steam Machine clears 166 fps at 1440p with the quality knobs up. That is the point of having it. It answers a different question from the heavy titles - not 'can this rig cope', but 'does this rig have real headroom at high refresh', which is exactly what you want to know before putting a machine under a television.

It is also an honest look at how a GPU behaves when the frame times get short. The volumetric lighting scene runs hardest and the shadow scene swings widest, so a rig that averages well but paces badly has nowhere to hide across the five-scene spread.