Slashdot Mirror
Futuremark 3DMark06 Released
jmke writes "Futuremark has released their latest graphics card evaluation software. The 2006 version features all the latest technologies and will stress even the most expensive video cards. From the announcement: 'Continuing forward in the development of advanced game performance benchmarks, Futuremark announced today the release and immediate availability of 3DMark06. A more comprehensive and unrestricted benchmark than previous versions, 3DMark06 includes an array of 3D graphics, CPU and 3D feature tests for overall performance measurement of current and future PC gaming systems.' Futuremark is offering a free download of the software with limited capability while offering an advanced edition for a price. PC Perspectives also has a nice overview of some of the features available."
OK, I check the framerates posted at Tom's or other hardware review sites as much as the next guy, but to me an article on slashdot about a new 3D benchmark program is about as exciting as one on a new type of screwdriver. This stuff should just work, and if it were not for the non-stop planned obsolence of video-cards where the obsurdly expensive card you bought three months ago is now obsolete.
DAMN IT!
-ATI
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
On the criteria that 3DMark is the standard for testing gaming performance on Windows, and many of us here on slashdot are gamers who use windows since that's where the games are? Every game console [except maybe 3DO, which is dead] is a closed platform but that doesn't stop slashdot from reporting on 'em.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I probably would have checked the neat graphics on some Windows box of one of my into-games-friends, but the whole things looks like nothing more than a SLIGHTLY revamped 3dmark05. Seems they just had to add more details to the existing demos noone would really notice in fast-paced games at all, just to drive video card sales to new heights. Read: "Nothing really new and exciting to see for you here, please move along."
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
You have to take all overclocking claims with a bit of salt, because for some people it's like the size of their penis depends on it. They'll be... very creative and selective in what they tell you, and that's putting it very mildly.
I've briefly been into the overclocker willy-waving scene myself, so you can take that as an admission. Guilty as charged, guv'nor.
Anyway, I've played with it long enough to know that there very rarely is a hard point where the card works 100% flawlessly, and 1 MHz higher it just locks up. There's more of a gradient grey zone where the card sorta works enough to finish one particular benchmark, but glitches, is unstable, or eventually overheats. And where it might work at that frequency in one game or benchmark, but lock up hard in 20 others.
The big overclocking brag-fests you read are usually from this grey area, not from the 100% stable zone.
Yes, you see some screenshots of a mondo 3DMark number there or of some utility showing the card running at 4 gazillion megaherz, but what you don't see is that it runs stable only for the 10 minutes needed to finish the benchmark. After that it overheats and starts artefacting, or outright locking up.
Be even more suspicious of brag-fests where they only ran half of 3DMark, and hand-waved the other tests as "bah, they didn't make much of a difference on the score anyway." (Ever notice how the biggest overclocking claims fall in that category?) Usually it means it crashed or locked up in those tests.
So I wouldn't take those as a baseline or as "_all_ 6800 cards make it that high with no problems, and it's just the mean MBAs at Nvidia marking them down." Fully expect that any card you buy might not be quite stable that high.
Which brings me to another point. To paraphrase another saying "overclocking gives you something for 'free', if your time is worth nothing." Because in the end the price you'll pay is a lot of time tweaking and testing that overclock... for each new game you buy, time replaying 30 minutes worth of something _again_ because the card locked up just before the save point, etc. It can end up a passtime in and by itself.
Fed up with slashdot? I am too.
Does anyone know of any decent cross-platform OpenGL/openal/SDL benchmarks?
:)
Preferrably in the form of a shiny demo with techno music, of course
It would be nice to compare the performance of OpenGL implementations on different systems.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
http://www.futuremark.com/download/files/3DMark06_ v102_installer.exe.torrent
It requires excel to read a log outputted to excel format. There are other options to output the log, I assume.
Weighing in at a suicidal 575 megabyates, 3DMark06 expands benchmarking from beyond the graphics subsystem to include an array of hard drives, CPU and server failover tests for overall performance measurement of current and future web serving systems when the ever-loving fuck being Slashdotted out of them.
My girlfriend can do the same scan of a face in 0.33 seconds.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
In my opnion 3dmark scores should not be considered in hardware reviews. I have seen video cards get low 3dmark scores, yet play all the latest games out of the box with out problems with speed. I take actual game benchmarks more in to consideration.
a site of Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X users?
Are you (incorrectly) implying that most visitors don't use Windows (they do), or that the Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X users are so fragile and delicate that we must avoid discussing anything that runs outside of these environments?
Or are you just trolling?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Where on Slashdot does it say "only for Linux, FreeBSD and OS X" users?
I believe the "news for nerds" allows for coverage of gaming, as many nerds play computer and video games. The biggest computer game platform is Windows. This benchmark is to show how video cards perform under current Windows gaming technologies (i.e. DirectX).
Oh and by the way, since you seem to have a problem with closed source... how does OS X fit in? Sure Darwin is open source, but OS X is not just Darwin and is just as proprietary as Windows. Indeed with a Mac, Apple ultimately controls both the hardware and software. So this fits into the open source geek mentality exactly how?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Good luck guys. Ive been following 3dmark for a long time, and since 3dmark2001 downloads keep getting worse. Not only is the benchmark a big file (560+MB) but there is something else going on today... The Empire at War demo is out, coming in at 742MB. For those who dont know, empire at war is a StarWars RTS from the makers of Command and Conquer and has positive reviews. Just a heads up
Indeed with a Mac, Apple ultimately controls both the hardware and software. So this fits into the open source geek mentality exactly how?
It doesn't. Or at least, it shouldn't. But Apply fanboyism is rampant around these parts.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If my GeForce FX 5500 will break the 1 FPS barrier with this one :)
I had a bit of an emergency at work today - we're doing a demonstration tomorrow and the VIVO (Video In/Video Out) graphics card on one of our demo setups died, so we had to go to a local store and buy *anything* that matched this spec:
/dev/deity
ATI (cos we didn't want to rewrite some of our code)
PCI Express
VIVO
So we got stung for ~£200 for an ATI X800 variant. Which I don't mind, but it came in the biggest-ass box you've ever seen. The cover had some rendered image of a woman with enormous tits and the heatpipe had the manufacturers name stamped in it, as if the thing had been carried down by Moses straight from
Why can't somebody just do a nice card with *stable* 2d and nice video acceleration under Linux, with 3d acceleration as good as you can get without pumping out loads of heat or having a fan? Matrox are nice for 2D but you couldn't ever play the occasional 3D game on them. Why does every card have to be marketed to the sort of kid who has neons underneath their car?
The min specs are 2.5GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 256MB of vram.
How many people can really run this??
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
I've got the 2 Meg version, not the inferior 1 Meg card.
I know of some types of screwdrivers - Straight, Phillips, Allen, Torex, and Square. Are there more?