Official PoE Benchmark.

I shouldn't need to say this, but for the sake of being thorough, I'll say it anyway.

The game has a ridiculous variance in how taxing on hardware running it can be.

Running around in early acts with a fireball or 'mortal' attack speed with a minimum of effects is a vastly different experience than a full party of ridiculous builds doing dumb shit, like juiced blighted maps.

One recent example was a near death I had taking a spectre build too close to a divine shrine. Game dropped to a slideshow / seizure fest during which I had to identify the issue and somehow click the shrine without getting killed by immortal monsters. While I'm 'only' running a RX 590, it's 'technically' above the recommended specs. And I was solo, with a 'valid' build.

I have been watching reviews of newer PC hardware trying to find the best graphics card for PoE specifically. But what to pick for PoE? There's no valid data, no reliable way to test.
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Not sure how a benchmark would look, but having builds by people from the community (eirikeiken / Nervyr, etc) with the sole purpose of melting GPU's, and having those characters in ridiculous situations would be kind of neat.

For consistency, it would have to be self-contained, with the benchmark client acting as both server and client with fixed rolls / key inputs for the action on screen.

I predict plenty of bottlenecks to go around and slideshow fests even on very expensive hardware. Should be good.

A benchmark wouldn't help much. Some skills are more taxing on the hardware.

I mean, the old whispering ice was killing any GPU (as low as 15fps with my 2080, 3800x @ 4250mhz, 3440x1440p) while i'm pretty sure i had a rock solid 60fps in 4k with glacial cascade 4-5 leagues ago.

I'm pretty sure POE2 will offer a huge gain in performance.

PoE engine is great for benchmarking.
This would be a truly innovative "one of the kind" product — a benchmark that can produce unpredictable different results on the same hardware.

I think you're misunderstanding me, it would need to be fairly consistent when it comes to run to run variance. Just throwing builds at the game and recording fps number is meaningless.

While I don't know know much about write pc games, I do know a little about programming.

I assume it would be possible to record inputs and use pre-done calculations. Use those for the benchmark. Would look and feel, and render, like PoE but would be using scripted/prerecorded events.

Yes, skills within the game preform different, but we've all been in parties with 'that one guy' (or maybe we've been him), that causes everything to lag so hard you can only hope stuff around you dies before your character does. Not testing for common game play, but for the worst case scenarios.