Concept: Final Fantasy XIV Benchmark "Launcher" (with Leaderboards)
First i'd like to apologize because my image editing skills are terrible, however i think the picture is enough to have an idea of what i'm asking for.
How it could work:
The idea would be to have a Launcher for the Benchmarks of every version of current and Future Benchmarks.
People would download the launcher, click one of the Benchmarks releases for each major version of Final Fantasy XIV and select the one(s) they want to Test, which would proceed to downloading the version of the Benchmark specified unless already installed.
From here people could pick the DirectX version supported by that benchmark (image bellow has 2.0 DX11 greyed out because it doesn't support it), edit settings such as resolution and Anti Aliasing settings.
Obviously there would be a "standard" preset set by the Devs that would be used for the Leaderboards.
Why Leaderboards?
The idea of having Leaderboards would be to bring more people to the game, it doesn't mean most people who used the Benchmark for the leaderboards would be interested in playing the game itself, but there's various Benchmarks out there where people try the best they can to be on Top, those people post their results on forums and Youtube (example) which would be a source to "Showcase" the game.
There shouldn't be rewards associated with Benchmark leaderboards, due to obvious reasons.
There should also be a separate leaderboard for each of the benchmarks as well.
The leaderboards would display details such as Min, Average and Max FPS, CPU, GPU, GPU Drivers version, OS version (separate sub-leaderboards for resolutions: 1080p, 1440p, 4k (example)).
The leaderboards could the be used as an example for people looking for an upgrade to their system as well.
The display name of the users would depend if they have an in-game chracter, but would obviously require a Square Enix account to upload to the leaderboards.
Leaderboard Features
- Separate Leaderboards for each of the Benchmarks
- Standard profile set by the devs (aka default profile, and the only one that would be uploaded)
- Sub Leaderboards for each of the Benchmarks based on the resolution used, default page would be 1080p (due to being the most common).
- Clicking on a specific Benchmark score would display system details used for that benchmark, such as Min/Average/Max FPS, CPU, GPU, GPU Drivers, OS etc
Bellow is the concept pic (used as an example to give an idea, sorry for bad editing skills :p).
The pic shows:
- Selectable version of the Benchmark
- Selectable API (would vary depending if the benchmark supports DX9 only or also DX11)
- Screenshots showcasing the specific selected benchmark (for people who got the Benchmark but don't know about the game at all).
- Graph with Min/Average/Max FPS achieved in the benchmark.
- Leaderboards button taking people to the Leaderboards section of the Lodestone.
For reference the pic is just an "edited" version of the Heavensward benchmark, obviously it can look 1 billion times better.
http://i.imgur.com/Y3nlJX0.png
Again sorry for the poor editing skills :p