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Futuremark's 3DMark05 Review |
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Written by Phyro
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Monday, 04 October 2004 |
What about Rage3D's coverage
in Futuremark's 3DMark05? Another year, another 3DMark. Futuremark is back at it
again with 3DMark05, this time with the same company name! If 3DMark was
a game, it would be a highly-successful game franchise. This is actually the 5th
release of 3DMark, 6th if you include Final Reality. Over 24 million copies of
3DMark03
have been distributed worldwide! This amazing achievement shows both the growing
popularity of 3DMark, as well as the rising awareness of graphics
performance.
 Futuremark's 3DMark05 Review
This popularity has been both a blessing and a curse for Futuremark. They took a battering during the 3DMark03 era, with the increased emphasis on benchmark optimization by Independent Hardware Vendors’s (IHV) in their drivers. This allowed for a greater analysis of the relevance of synthetic benchmarks in graphics card reviews.
The controversial issue of driver optimizations, particularly shader replacement, stirred up a storm that lead to a battle between Futuremark and nVidia. This ultimately led to nVidia's withdrawal from the program. Simply put, this whole issue was messy and was not handled well. The credibility of Futuremark fell off significantly as 3DMark was questioned for how forward-thinking the tests were. People were no longer sure if they really were
a good indicator of how 3D graphics were likely to be seen over the next year and a half.
3DMark05 is a visually impressive display of what's possible in next generation games and what current graphics cards are capable of. The demo mode
is spectacular and I'm sure it'll be displayed in computer shops and conventions all around the world. Deep down you hope graphics technology accelerates quickly so as to allow mainstream graphics the capability to handle this level of graphics, therefore allowing game developers to design games with this kind of visual impact.
As a benchmarking tool it has improved from 3DMark03 with added tools such as
the graphing mode and the option to compare the effects of choosing different Shader Models.
The usefulness of synthetic benchmarks will still be debated but I believe the tools that 3DMark05 provides are useful when used properly and for the right purposes. As a consumer yes I want to know how a video card performs in games of today but most likely I also want the video card to last for future games. 3DMark05 gives an indicator on how the video card will be able to handle next generation gaming technology. How accurate will it be? No one is sure but it's better than having no measure to compare against.
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