How about some numbers?

if i may inject a bit of intruige into this 3dmark/physx situation, it's known among demosceners (if you don't know what that is, check pouet.net and be amazed) that one of the most legendary scener coders, pierre terdiman, works for ageia these days. he's written many collision detection routines, and lots of other very useful 3d software (eg flexporter).

futuremark (or maturefurk as their demoscene group is called) used to be pretty active in the scene as well, and it's not hard to imagine the guys all getting together on #coders to arrange some sort of partnership... with pierre working on the software side i wouldn't be at all surprised if the sdk is *highly* optimised- he has incredible talent in that area.

I like 3dMark. I like FutureMark. We need these kind of products, in spite of their downfalls.

This benchmark absolutely SHINES for people with the same or similar hardware to find where they are lacking/misconfigured. A guy with the same computer as you, even 300 points less, obviously has some tuning to do.

On the flipside, you must take the results for cross-brand and cross-card comparisons with a grain of salt. But it still has some merit. Just don't write anything in stone based on a 3dMark06 result alone (a single benchmark shouldn't determine your opinion of one video card vs another).

One bad thing is that people tend to use them to brag about their hardware which is lame. On that note, I got a 4582; any 7800 GTX's wanna tango w/ my EVGA 7800GT @ 513/1.18 ? :)

Red & Green birds flying into the Damage labs, and singing about a computer system benchmark?

Remember kids, just say NO TO DRUGS!

*cue the music*

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green,
Towering over your head.
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes,
And she's gone.

Editorializing within, be warned:

Hopefully the content regurgitation is a sign Futuremark doesn't have the resources to produce much anymore, and that it'll burst into flames and disappear soon.

3DMark hurts the industry. At a minimum, the time and money Nvidia and ATI spend on relations with Futuremark would be better spent on developer relations. If they could work with one or two more dev houses, it'd be worth it. And the time hardware review sites spend benchmarking it would be better spent benchmarking just one more real game. I guess I will concede it's probably faster to run 3D Mark benches than a typical game, but I stand by the point.

If Futuremark was a side project collaboration of developers I'd have infinitely more faith in it. But it is not. While some of the talent may have originated from the real game development community, they're still not going to be doing things the way the real devs do.

I think all that needs to be done to sink Futuremark like the rotten, stinking, rat-infested ironclad it is would be for either Nvidia or ATI to just say "we've had enough" and stop talking to them. Even though they'll bench poorly for a time, faith in 3D Mark would plummet to new lows.

Eh, good effort on that, uh, literary thing. I'm a big fan of your witty one-liners; this new level of embellishment you're stepping to needs some polish maybe.

Now I finally realize what 3dmark is for. It's to make my e-genitalia shrivel. I thought I had a decent rig, but only 1742 3dmarks?!? oh noes! Now I have to go buy a 7800GTX512 because I'm obviously inadequate.

Now, if only I can figure out how to make the drivers play nice with an nVidia card in my PCI-E x16 slot and an ATI card in my AGP slot (I have an Asrock 939Dual-SATA2)....

I can't wait to try this on my GF6100 integrated, 'cause it feels so good when I stop.

Steve's not here, man.

The real question is: How long till the graphics card companies start to cheat? I give it a month.

And that write up is why I love TR so much.

Just what the world needs, another synthetic e-penis measurement program.

you know you are behind the times when you have 3dmark2001 as your standard benchmark!

For a while there i thought the world was upside down or that you had kidnapped Jade, then i saw the blue background. Good take on everything, and nice spacing out abit. I like things like that.

well, even at 100megs/second, I won't have it for a while. I'm just gunna grab this one over night.

IMHO they should remove the direct links all together and put the servers to boost BT speeds. BT with server backbone FTW.

This must mean that new video drivers will also soon be released HOORAY!

Was there also a guy in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at him while extolling the virtues of a unified shader architecture?

Why am I the only one...

Oh my, you forgot the main thing!!! You should have asked birdies about 3DM06 Cheat codes, they allways know them. I asked Dr. Google, but he doesn't know a thing :(

A fun, but critical, read. Bravo!

Nice mix of tech and poetry or attempting to... Must be reminiscient of the 'Get Perpendicular'.

Just to start a flame war......

Does it support Vertex Texture Fetch?

And how much poop did the birds leave behind?

As I said in the comments section of the Athlon 64 FX-60 and the Pentium EE 955, I thought 3Dmark 05 was pretty useless. It gave the nod to the Pentium EE when in real world games, it got Annihilated. I suppose it would be interesting to run those tests again on the new version and see if the Petium still wins. And if it does you can get rid of 3Dmark because it obviously isn't any good. But I guess we'll wait and see.

Gav

I just finished reading this....I feel dizzy. I'd sit down, but I'm already sitting down. It reads like one of my college philosophy 101 textbooks (EDIT: when I was in college, which is now fifteen years ago).

And I thought I had caffeine problems. ;)

P.S. I think I figured it out. I just had to visualise the sound of one hand clapping first.

I've read a couple of articles today. Looks alright. Probably not good for what it is meant to do, but still useful as a tweaking guide for people, as they can compare their results against the database and see if they're performing on par or if something is grossly wrong.

And interesting writeup, heh.

Is the pirate maddox?

Hum... all the download sites seemed to be going very slow. Oh well I don't think this lab computer would even be able to run it.

I was hoping to put it on my flash drive but 590MB is too big for it.

Great read, more of this please.... (of course Mike McGeek might get upset)...

Shiver me timbers, Captain Scott!

Good reading

This is unusual...I thought the Green bird was more anti-3DMark (like with '03) and the Red bird would be more pro-3DMark. Clearly FutureMark is doing something right because it's now angered both birds. Everyone rejoices, because this is only marginally effective for me as a benchmark...it's more fun to watch and test system stability than it is useful.

Clearly the hallucinogens also.