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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 29 September 2004 |
Well it seems all review sites have been looking at 3DMark05, so also Bjorn3D has put his review online. If there is one benchmark that has stood tall over the years, it is the 3DMark series from Futuremark. Ever since the release of 3DMark99 back in 1998, Futuremark has continued to provide us users (and reviewers) with a way to compare our video cards in a reproducible way. True, the benchmarks have been surrounded with some controversy the last few years, and many have questioned the use of synthetic benchmarks.
 Futuremark's 3DMark05
Note that it wouldn't have been a smart move by Futuremark to require a
DirectX 9 video card for 3DMark03 since those cards still weren't that common at that
time. Today, things look different though. While there still are a lot of DX8.1
video cards out there, DX9 cards have been available for quite a long time. With
3DMark05, Futuremark has brought us the first benchmark that requires a
DX9 based video card with support for at least Shader Model 2.0. 3DMark05
extensively uses Shader Model 2 and 3 for all vertex and pixel processing. You
can also run all the compatible shaders with SM 2.0a and SM 2.0b.
Any
serious gamer should definitely get 3DMark05,
preferably the Pro version. As always, Futuremark has created a neat, well packaged benchmark which
will become the standard DirectX 9 benchmark until the next 3DMark comes
out.
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NiBiTor v6.06
