The Reverend over at Beyond 3D has thrown up a very interesting article in which he talks about 3DMark®05!
After viewing two pre-release versions and its gold version prior to being launched publicly, I emailed 3DMark05's producer, Patric Ojala, about how pleased I was with it. From the presentation, to implementation, to graphics, to music, even right down to the end-credits were all very well produced. Like its predecessor, it is not "synthetic enough" for Beyond3D but this is not our application and we fully respect the priorities Futuremark places on 3DMark05. We're not sure how useful the three game tests will be in B3D's video card reviews; we'll need to spend more time investigating what 3D features are stressed on in each game test. The extras (the tools) is an improvement on 3DMark03 however and that is appreciated by B3D. To recap what I posted a long time ago during the formulation stages of 3DMark05, where Futuremark asked for input from its BDP members : Those were my suggestions to Futuremark for 3DMark05 when Futremark asked for suggestions in the infancy stages of 3DMark05. How much of my suggestions were actually implemented is an on-going investigation of mine currently.
There is, however, an issue that Dave and I have viewed as serious and that is enabling Depth Stencil Textures (DST, probably a new buzzword) as a DEFAULT setting in 3DMark05. While we won't argue that using this when depth shadow maps are used is A Good Thing, we do have concerns about this being enabled by default. Although Futuremark's intentions behind every 3DMark is to more-or-less predict the routes that will be taken by game developers, we need to recognize the big difference between making games and making a benchmark application. Which category does 3DMarkXX belong to? More important than how the public views this is how Futuremark themselves view this. At the moment, I'm not sure if Futuremark knows what 3DMark is. Here's something I wrote Futuremark yesterday :
Reverend Talks About 3DMark®05
After viewing two pre-release versions and its gold version prior to being launched publicly, I emailed 3DMark05's producer, Patric Ojala, about how pleased I was with it. From the presentation, to implementation, to graphics, to music, even right down to the end-credits were all very well produced. Like its predecessor, it is not "synthetic enough" for Beyond3D but this is not our application and we fully respect the priorities Futuremark places on 3DMark05. We're not sure how useful the three game tests will be in B3D's video card reviews; we'll need to spend more time investigating what 3D features are stressed on in each game test. The extras (the tools) is an improvement on 3DMark03 however and that is appreciated by B3D. To recap what I posted a long time ago during the formulation stages of 3DMark05, where Futuremark asked for input from its BDP members : Those were my suggestions to Futuremark for 3DMark05 when Futremark asked for suggestions in the infancy stages of 3DMark05. How much of my suggestions were actually implemented is an on-going investigation of mine currently.
There is, however, an issue that Dave and I have viewed as serious and that is enabling Depth Stencil Textures (DST, probably a new buzzword) as a DEFAULT setting in 3DMark05. While we won't argue that using this when depth shadow maps are used is A Good Thing, we do have concerns about this being enabled by default. Although Futuremark's intentions behind every 3DMark is to more-or-less predict the routes that will be taken by game developers, we need to recognize the big difference between making games and making a benchmark application. Which category does 3DMarkXX belong to? More important than how the public views this is how Futuremark themselves view this. At the moment, I'm not sure if Futuremark knows what 3DMark is. Here's something I wrote Futuremark yesterday :
Reverend Talks About 3DMark®05
