Compares best and worst runs and gives stability rating. We're always on the lookout for augmenting our testing suite with benchmarks that do something different. The folks over at Futuremark have updated the popular 3DMark benchmark - one that we use in our graphics-card reviews - to include a stability tool, and it works in an interesting way.

Rather than tell you the hardware has an absolute pass, as a program like Prime95 or wPrime would do for the CPU, the 3DMark Stress Tests, available to users with registered copies of either the Advanced or Professional Editions, look at the average frame rate during a loop and compares it against the scores obtained in other loops. The premise is to weed out graphics cards that throttle frequency once a certain temperature limit has been reached, thus lowering performance compared to usually the first run.