Futuremark's Latest Attempt: 3DMark06 Tested

Final Words

As we've said before, 3DMark is a somewhat specialized benchmarking tool with the ability to measure a lot of different aspects of a gaming system, and while it may not be best suited for testing performance between cards, there are many other things this program is useful for.

3DMark06 is quite useful for doing more focused comparisons with hardware components. For instance, comparing 3DMark results between a card and an overclocked version of itself can give a good idea of how a given card's clock speeds scale. Another use would be for testing drivers and to determine what kind of improvements certain features may have had between updates. We typically use looped game benchmarks when testing the stability of a graphics card while overclocking, but 3DMark would make a good tool for this as well. With 3DMark's demos, any graphical tearing or visual anomalies would very easily be seen. By taking screen shots, 3DMark would also be a great tool for comparing image quality in Anti-Aliasing or filtering for example.

There are likely many other uses for this program, which we can't mention here, and there is no doubt that 3DMark will remain a popular benchmarking program. Our uses for this program mostly involve more specific feature comparisons rather than those between the performance of different cards. Again, real-world tests show how 3DMark test scores don't really reflect actual performance in a game, particularly when you consider that different games will always favor different graphics hardware.

The bottom line is that a graphics card was made for playing games. Futuremark has developed a nice tool with excellent graphical elements in this latest version of 3DMark, which hopefully game makers will aspire to achieve in future games. Regardless of how you use it, 3DMark06 shows off some very impressive graphics and is a definite improvement over 3DMark05 both in visual quality and in the types of performance tests used. We certainly won't be focusing on 3DMark scores in future graphics card comparisons, but we may see some of the feature set tests or image quality comparisons pop up down the road.