Synthetic gaming benchmarks have always been a source of controversy in hardware-testing realms, and 3DMark developer Futuremark cop virtually all of the flack in this regard. From accusations of bias to shady driver tweaks, results have always been taken with a grain of salt by hardcore bench-testers.
Nevertheless, 3DMark11 is upon us in all its DirectX 11 glory and, much like all previous 3DMark versions at release time, it will bring your system crashing down to its knees as it shudders out a slideshow of tessellated eye candy, but damn does it look pretty.
The most noteworthy features in this latest rendition of the world’s most popular gaming benchmark are tessellation, compute shading and multi-threading.
In a nutshell, tessellation is the technique used to increase the detail of an on-screen object as you get closer to it, without having to render unnecessary detail until you are close enough to see it, thus saving system resources without compromising image quality.
Compute shading, aka DirectCompute, is the latest craze of taking tasks like physics calculations and AI which are normally handled by the CPU and giving them to the video card to process. GPU’s are much more efficient at crunching these numbers due to the large amount of processing threads they can handle, plus it leaves the CPU free to do other important stuff.
Multi-threading meanwhile is a bit more self-explanatory: DirectX 11 can use all available CPU cores to process instructions to send to the GPU for rendering. This means you can finally utilise that quad core you mortgaged your house for back in 2006! Happy days.
The program itself consists of six tests – four graphical tests, one physics test and one combined CPU/GPU stress test. The tests are all set in two jaw-dropping scenes, dubbed “High Temple” and “Deep Sea” (see the video below to check them out), and utilise a wide gamut of technologies used by modern game developers such as volumetric lighting, post-processing (google “bokeh splatting”, I dare you), tessellation, and soft as well as rigid body physics.
You can choose to run the tests in one of four different modes – Entry, Performance, Extreme or Custom. Entry uses the lowest resolution and quality settings, Extreme uses the highest, and Performance is somewhere in between.
All three of these modes return a score (a higher score meaning better performance of course) which you can use to compare against other systems or, for example, before and after overclocking to check for performance gains. You can even post them to Futuremark’s online database and compare your score against thousands of other frothing geeks. Custom mode doesn’t give you a score but you can tweak all the quality and resolution settings if that is what floats your boat.
Just to give you a taste of what kind of scores to expect, here are a few runs I did on my own system;
Test system
- CPU: Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.6GHz (HT Off)
- RAM: 6GB G.Skill Trident @ DDR3-1800 CL9
- Mobo: Asus P6X58D Premium
- GPU: Gigabyte Radeon HD 6850 1GB
- OS: Windows 7 HP 64bit
- Drivers: AMD 10.10e Hotfix
You can’t tell from the numbers but in Extreme mode I think my system was averaging about 5 to 6 frames per second – ouch! It is designed to be futureproofed however, and personally I can’t wait to see systems that can bang out 10,000 points or more in Extreme mode because it’s just so gosh darn pretty to watch.
3DMark11 is available as a free download, but to unlock all the different modes and options you’ll need the advanced version which costs USD $19.95.
So, love it or hate it, a new era of 3DMark nerd-wars is upon us. Let the benchmarking begin!
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To learn more about 3DMark 11, head over to the official site. We've mirrored the 3DMark 11 installer at GP Downloads (279MB).
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