3DMark06 Performance Review: The Future of Computer Games in Numbers

[onethreehill]

Futuremark’s 3DMark testing suites are always in the middle of different discussions and arguments. Some would accuse them of generating unfair results, the others regard them as the only measuring tool for 3D performance… But one fact is truly undeniable: very often 3DMark results are prophetic predicting the graphics cards performance in the upcoming gaming applications with high certainty, even though these games are still under development. We witnessed this with 3DMark03 and 3DMark05. Will the new 3DMark06 be able to repeat the success of the predecessors? This is the question we are going to answer in out today’s article devoted to detailed testing of 20 graphics cards and 19 CPUs in the new 3DMark06 suite.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/3dmark06.html

[mursaat]

As we noted in our 3DMark05 review, the 2003 version of the suite, 3DMark03, met the mentioned requirement by using stencil shadows and complex pixel shaders. It predicted quite well the performance of graphic cards in such popular games as Far Cry, Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and others. 3DMark05 came out next, stressing the use of a great number of pixel shaders in a single scene, i.e. exactly like in many today’s games like F.E.A.R., Battlefield 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Call of Duty 2, Serious Sam 2 to mention but a few.The reverse is also possible,can game developers and gpu engineers be influenced by 3dmark trends?. I've been thinking this for some while (maybe I read it somewhere). GPU engineers afraid of developing a wrong technology because game developers go the way futuremark said thinks should be in a future.

I think Futuremark has achieved to be so influential, if not that much at least a big part (if not remember nvidia tweaking drivers to perform better...)