Futuremark’s 3DMark Benchmark Now Available

Futuremark’s latest gaming benchmark 3DMark is now available to download. This time they have simply gone with “3DMark” (the last version was 3DMark 11) as it seems this version is more of a reboot. This all new 3DMark is a collection of three independent benchmark suites, each with its own demos, game tests, physics tests, and combined tests, and scoring.

3dmark

The 3 new tests are as follows:
Fire Strike is a new DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today. Fire Strike will only be available in the Windows editions of 3DMark initially.

Cloud Gate is a new test that is designed for Windows notebooks and typical home PCs. Cloud Gate includes two graphics tests and a physics test. Cloud Gate uses a DirectX 11 engine limited to Direct3D feature level 10 making it suitable for testing DirectX 10 compatible hardware. Cloud Gate will only be available in the Windows editions of 3DMark initially.

Use Ice Storm to test the performance of your smartphone, tablet, ultra-portable notebook or entry level PC. Ice Storm includes two graphics tests focusing on GPU performance and a physics test for measuring CPU performance. On Windows, Ice Storm uses a DirectX 11 engine limited to Direct3D feature level 9. On Android and iOS, Ice Storm uses OpenGL ES 2.0. You can compare scores across platforms.

3dmark results

As you can guess from the descriptions this is a cross-platform benchmark. While only available on Windows right now it will be ported to iOS, Android and Windows RT in the near future. This means we really are going to have a definitive graphics benchmark for tablets.

There are 3 different versions of 3DMark. First is the Basic Edition (Free), which allows you to run the benchmarks at the default settings and view the scores online. The Advanced Edition ($24.95) which lets you run the tests at custom settings and view results offline and finally the Professional Edition ($995) which gives you command-line access, XML export for results and second by second details on each test.

Source: Futuremark | News Archive

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