 It's that time of the year again: the red-clad jolly men have gone, there are no more elves in sight, people have stopped singing annoying carols, and it's time to make your PCs cry again with the latest edition of 3DMark.
Futuremark released 3DMark 2006 yesterday, and you can already grab your copy from our official downloads mirror right here, but the newest edition of this venerable and respected benchmarking tool deserves a more in-depth look, since so much has changed, evolving everyone's favourite game benchmarking tool into a far more powerful and versatile performance measurement platform than ever before.
3D Mark 2006 presents a much improved interface, two new measurement scores, a whole different philosophy to its standard benchmarking formula, as well as the usual and incredible array of torture algorhythms for GPUs and CPUs alike.
Design phylosophy has shifted to more specific testing for each part, and so there is a new, CPU-only test, as well as a new HDR Test. For the rest, two of the three main graphics test from 3DMark 2005, Return to Proxycon and Firefly Forest, have been upgraded, and are now labelled as Shader Model 2.0 tests, while Canion Flight now is an HDR/Shader Model 3.0 test, along with the newcomer, Deep Freeze.
Three of the tests may sound like they've been recycled, but nothing could be farther from the truth - the upgrades to each are substantial and all-invasive, and a lot of work went into each exquisite animated scene, whose texturing, lighting and high polygon counts are bound to make just about any modern PC quake.
Page 01: Introduction
Page 02: Test Machines
Page 03: Test Results
Page 04: The Tests...
Page 05: and the Rest
Page 06: Conclusions
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