Although they’re a mainstay of the overclocking and benchmarking communities, Futuremark’s 3DMark benchmarks have come under considerable flak over the last few years for being nothing more than pretty-looking synthetic benchmarks that bear little relation to real games. However, now that Futuremark has announced its own Games Studio, the Vantage's benchmarks could now actually represent a test of a real game engine. As well as this, of course, 3DMark also provides a vision of how PC games could look - and they will be absolutely fantastic if 3DMark Vantage is anything to go by.
So what’s new in this version? Well, pretty much all of it. While previous versions of 3DMark have often nodded towards their predecessors by featuring enhanced versions of tests from previous version, or at least one test that uses the previous version of DirectX, 3DMark Vantage is a completely new suite of benchmarks. It requires DirectX 10, so without Vista and a DirectX 10 graphics card, it won't run.
As well as this, the four tests that contribute to the score are all completely new. These take the form of two GPU tests and CPU tests, although there’s also the usual set of optional feature tests that you can enable too. Another new feature that 3DMark is introducing is the idea of presets. Instead of there just being one standard 3DMark benchmark setting, such as 1,280 x 1,024 with no anti-aliasing, you can now pick from four as follows:
Entry (requires 128MB of graphics memory) – 1,024 x 768, 0x AA, Trilinear filtering, Entry shaders, no motion blur or depth-of-field post-processing effects
Performance (requires 256MB of graphics memory) – 1,280 x 1,024, 0x AA, Trilinear, Performance shaders, all post-processing effects
High (requires 512MB of graphics memory) – 1,680 x 1,050, 2x AA, 8x AF, High shaders , all post-processing effects
Extreme – 1,920 x 1,200, 4x AA, 16x AF, Extreme shaders
As a result of all this, your 3DMark score will now be prefixed with the first letter of the preset’s name, and then split into a total score, GPU score and CPU score. For example, a 3DMark score at the Entry preset could be E15000, and one for the Performance preset could be P4500.
The benchmark’s new engine also features both opaque and translucent illumination, shadow map generation and plenty of fancy post-processing effects, including bloom, depth-of-field, motion blur, film grain noise, volumetric fog and many more. The feature tests are also worth a look, providing a very impressive display of GPU particle systems in action, as well as a great cloth simulation with rippling flags.
Click on the links below for the full skinny on the new tests, as well as our first test result.
Author: Ben Hardwidge
3DMark Vantage – first look