As you no doubt know, nearly all video game benchmarks are based on a single unit of measure, the ubiquitous FPS, or frames per second. FPS is a nice instant summary of performance, expressed in terms that are relatively easy to understand. After all, your average geek tends to know that movies happen at 24 FPS and television at 30 FPS, and any PC gamer who has done any tuning probably has a sense of how different frame rates "feel" in action.
Of course, there are always debates over benchmarking methods, and the usual average FPS score has come under fire repeatedly over the years for being too broad a measure. We've been persuaded by those arguments, so for quite a while now, we have provided average and low FPS rates from our benchmarking runs and, when possible, graphs of frame rates over time. We think that information gives folks a better sense of gaming performance than just an average FPS number.
