Five recent techniques from hybrid and optimal control are evaluated on two power electronics benchmark problems. The benchmarks involve a number of practically interesting operating scenarios for fixed-frequency synchronous dc-dc converters. The specifications are defined such that good performance can only be obtained if the switched and nonlinear nature of the problem is accounted for during the design phase. A nonlinear action is featured in all methods either intrinsically or as external logic. The designs are evaluated and compared on the same experimental platform. Experiments show that the proposed methods display high performances, while respecting circuit constraints, thus protecting the semiconductor devices. Moreover, the complexity of the controllers is compatible with the high-frequency requirements of the considered application.