  In this paper, the performance of more than 40 popular or recently developed
density functionals is assessed for the calculation of 463 vertical excitation
energies against the large and accurate QuestDB benchmark set. For this
purpose, the Tamm-Dancoff approximation offers a good balance between
performance and accuracy. The functionals $\omega$B97X-D and BMK are found to
offer the best performance overall with a Root-Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.28
eV, better than the computationally more demanding CIS(D) wavefunction method
with a RMSE of 0.36 eV. The results also suggest that Jacob's ladder still
holds for TDDFT excitation energies, though hybrid meta-GGAs are not generally
better than hybrid GGAs. Effects of basis set convergence, gauge invariance
correction to meta-GGAs, and nonlocal correlation (VV10) are also studied, and
practical basis set recommendations are provided.
