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3DMark05 arrives - Tomorrow's benchmark debuts today |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 29 September 2004 |
Well the first reviews & articles are getting published on the new 3DMark05 Benchmark Suite. The Tech Report was one of the first websites to have an article about it online. Futuremark intends its new version of 3DMark to give us a glimpse of the future yet again, and if 3DMark05 is any indication, the future of 3D games looks very bright indeed. Read on to see what Futuremark has wrought and how thirteen of the latest graphics cards perform in this new benchmark.
 3DMark05 arrives - Tomorrow's benchmark debuts today
Beyond the three new game tests, the purely synthetic tools in 3DMark05 include some welcome improvements for us hardware reviewer types. I'm glad to see the fill rate test tend toward theoretical peaks; we can test real-world fill rate better in games. However, I'm disappointed the fill rate tool doesn't offer more granularity, with results for Z/stencil writes distinct from color writes. 3DMark05 does include an interesting new test of performance with different sized batches of triangles. I haven't had time to play around with it yet, but this test should expose some weaknesses of poorly written graphics drivers. Finally, 3DMark05 packs some very nifty tools to capture statistics from a benchmark run. For instance, it will plot polygon counts over time from any of the game tests. I expect to get some use out of these tools over time, once we've further familiarized ourselves with their ins and outs.
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NiBiTor v6.03
