An extensive study of digital pulse processing methods is presented. Existing methods, both traditional and more recent, are compared with original advanced techniques within an appropriate modeling and benchmarking framework. This comprehensive approach ensures general applicability to the broad field of pulse processing, even though the focus lies on hard X-ray spectrometers operated at high count rates. In this regime, pile-up is the main issue and the individual pulse shape characteristics play a minor role, although they remain important for the algorithm parameter optimization. The digital implementation of double-differentiating analog filters and trapezoidal FIR filter methods results in excellent performance that is second only to that of optimum digital FIR filters. Several more complex methods involving increased computational effort are found not to meet the expectations. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.