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.
Recommended settings
- Resolution
- Not specified
- Preset
- Not specified
- Upscaling
- Not specified
- Ray tracing
- Not specified
- Built-in benchmark
- No
CPU sensitivity
0.3 - 0 is GPU-bound, 1 is CPU-bound.
DSOGaming's Alien: Isolation PC performance analysis (i7 4930K, GTX 690) is the CPU-scaling source I retrieved and read for this title. It measured a simulated dual-core above 100 fps and the full six-core above 150 fps, and concludes the game 'will not stress either the CPU or the GPU of a modern-day PC system', attributing the light processor load to there being little beyond the Alien's own AI to drive it. Six cores do sit roughly 50 percent ahead of two there, so the game is not thread-blind - but both figures land far above any refresh rate a couch rig targets, which is why 0.3 reads as GPU-bound in practice. Same two caveats as the rest of this era of testing: simulated core counts rather than a real multi-CPU comparison, on 2014 hardware.
Benchmark results
| Build / device | Preset | Upscaling | fps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Valve Steam Machine | Ultra (SMAA T1x, SSAO Standard) | Native | 166.56 fps Verified built-in benchmark |
How we measured this
Native 1080p. Upscaling, VSync, dynamic resolution and ray tracing off. Game Mode, frame limiter off, power profile at maximum. We report the median of 3 passes. | |||
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