Hardware stub

FutureMark Reveals New 3DMark Benchmarking Suite

Posted on December 5, 2012

A new trailer (below) is out for Futuremark Corporation's "Fire Strike" benchmark, part of the next 3DMark edition which is to be released before the end of 2012. Fire Strike is just one benchmark of three, and was created to stress DirectX 11-level hardware to its limits, even anticipating future advancements in technology and graphics.

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The trailer doesn't show the full extent of the test, though; according to Futuremark, it's actually a full 3 minutes long (and likely has looping for paid versions). These three minutes consist of "two graphics tests, a physics test, and a combined test that stresses both the CPU and GPU at the same time," begging the question "why are there two other benchmarks?"

Here's why:

The new 3DMark aims to be a truly cross-platform benchmark suite, hoping to re-secure its title as the go-to benching software. The Ice Storm test is designed for mobile/entry level hardware (Android, iOS included) and Cloud Gate has been tailored for notebooks and boring old non-gaming PCs. The idea is that you'll be able to compare your gaming, portable, and mainstream computing devices against each other and with their tiny mobile cousins using one consistent test.

Fire Strike, the test made for gaming rigs and the one of most interest to PC enthusiasts, uses (in the trailer) tessellation, dynamic particle illumination/shadowing, smoke simulation with grid-based fluid dynamics, and volume ray casting with shadows and post-processing effects including depth of field, blooms, distortions, and various lens effects (read more here). Futuremark has attempted to live up to their name by predicting the resource requirements of future games and hardware capabilities of future gaming rigs, hopefully leaving room for their tool to scale upward.

The Fire Strike portion of 3DMark will only be available for Windows at first, and other operating systems later.

You can check out the software suite here and read more about our own benchmarking suite here.