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Written by Phyro
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Friday, 01 October 2004 |
Well I wanted to mention that Accelenation has put an article online on 3DMark05.
The next chapter in Futuremark's synthetic benchmarking suite has finally arrived
- 3DMark05. Perhaps the term "synthetic" is slightly
disingenuous; after all, the 3DMark score itself has always been derived from
the in-built game simulations and never from the abstract "feature" tests. Some
people might argue that a score that derives from a single rendering engine can
never reflect hardware performance across a wide range of games. Although this
may be true, I believe that it completely misses the point of the 3DMark
result.
 3DMark05 Review
The purpose of a professional benchmarking
suite is to provide a consistent platform for hardware testing. The excessive configuration possibilities of retail games make them unsuitable for this
purpose. Although some retail games do incorporate benchmarking facilities, cross-comparison between testers is difficult to achieve without prior agreement
on the settings to be used. Such agreements are rare within the testing community, and for this reason it is far easier to use professional software where the testing methodology is well understood by all parties. The use of
retail games is perfectly adequate for internal cross-comparisons, but there is little reason not to supplement these results with a solid 3DMark score that can be used as a guide by everyone.
Futuremark include a number of tests to
cover common gaming scenarios and it is from these that the overall 3DMark score is derived. The suite also includes a host of purely synthetic rendering tests
in order to reveal the performance of specific hardware features and provide a better understanding of the overall 3DMark score. In addition to graphical performance, it is also possible to test underling system performance via the
CPU test. In addition, all tests can be carried out either individually or automated via a robust batching facility. However, performance is not everything, and to this end 3DMark also includes the facility to help judge image quality, reveal system specifications, upload results to a master database, and for the first time to generate graphs automatically.
In this article Accelenation has tried to present a summary of 3DMark features without delving into the same detail as the accompanying help file or technical documents. Overall they feel that the new suite of tests is more finely tuned than its predecessor to accomplish the intended task. It's possible to argue ad-nausea over the relevance of the gaming tests that produce the
all-important score, but as I pointed out in the introduction, the purpose of 3DMark is to provide a level playing field for graphical hardware testing. If this can be achieved while at the same time maintaining some relevance to modern rendering methodologies, then all the better. In both regards they believe that 3DMark05 will be a resounding success.
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