The folks at Futuremark say they’re "deep into final testing" of the next 3DMark, and they’ve posted a fresh trailer to get us all hyped up. This clip shows a new DirectX 11 scene, dubbed Fire Strike, which 3DMark calls its "most ambitious and technical benchmark ever." Ooh…
Well, that sure does look nice.
Futuremark says Fire Strike makes use of "tessellation, dynamic particle illumination and shadowing, smoke simulation using grid-based fluid dynamics, volume ray casting with shadows and a wide variety of post processing effects including depth of field, blooms, distortions and various lens effects." The firm expects those techniques to be "commonplace" in PC games in two or three years. That’s not such an outlandish proposition, since we are, after all, nearing the end of the current consoles’ life cycle.
Incidentally, Fire Strike really reminds me of that Unreal Engine 4 demo Epic Games showed in June. I guess there’s something about red-hot embers that really shows off those state-of-the-art DX11 particle engines.