Abstract Seven years ago, Szeliski et al. published an inflfluential study on energy minimization methods for Markov random fifields (MRF). This study provided valuable insights in choosing the best optimization technique for certain classes of problems. While these insights remain generally useful today, the phenominal success of random fifield models means that the kinds of inference problems we solve have changed signififi- cantly. Specififically, the models today often include higher order interactions, flflexible connectivity structures, large label-spaces of different cardinalities, or learned energy tables. To reflflect these changes, we provide a modernized and enlarged study. We present an empirical comparison of 24 state-of-art techniques on a corpus of 2,300 energy minimization instances from 20 diverse computer vision applications. To ensure reproducibility, we evaluate all methods in the OpenGM2 framework and report extensive results regarding runtime and solution quality. Key insights from our study agree with the results of Szeliski et al. for the types of models they studied. However, on new and challenging types of models our fifindings disagree and suggest that polyhedral methods and integer programming solvers are competitive in terms of runtime and solution quality over a large range of model types.