Futuremark launches 3DMark05 graphics benchmark

Saratoga (CA) - Futuremark today announced a new version of its 3DMark benchmarking software. The software now supports DirectX 9.0c shader models 2 and 3 and currently is the most demanding graphics benchmark on the market, the company said.

Now in its fifth generation, the graphics benchmarking software 3Dmark05 offers more features and support for all current graphics technologies. Among its added feature list is a new engine which builds shaders for each material in High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) format and uses model 2.0 and 3.0 for all vertex and pixel processing, rendering more than one million polygons per screen, and peak levels of up to over two million polygons per screen.

Futuremark said that the new core of the software also renders real-time light scattering for atmospherical effects perspective shadow maps (PSM) with depth stencil texture (DST) and hardware accelerated percentage closest filtering (PCF) if supported. Tests with the engine have been conducted with 3DLabs, AMD, ATI, Dell, Gateway, Imagination, Innovision, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, S3, and XGI, according to a statement released Wednesday.

Other new features include an image quality inspection tool, a pre-rendered reference rasterizer image database for comparison ; bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic filtering, several data count functions, as well as now 18 filters for search and comparison of results.

The new benchmark is available for $20 as download version and for $30 on CD. The business version is priced at $250. As before, Futuremark also offers a limited functionality evaluation version as a free download .