3DMark 11 out on 30th November

[Katzenschleuder]

While I cannot go to exact details or give examples, you couldn't be more wrong.

The goal is to have a stable and fair benchmark. Has always been. BDP helps to ensure that - you have to understand that all major vendors are in BDP. They also watch very carefully what each other does (duh!) and get early builds for testing and comments - and trust me, they do care. They also bring a lot more eyeballs for verifying and testing the code. Who do you think is best at spotting stuff that could be deemed "unfair" to vendor X than, well, vendor X themselves?

And yes, BDP has been instrumental in helping to get that final polish done.

So you are saying yourself that the IHV not paying you will have a disadvantage. That you call this a process of "transparency and fairness", is just laughable!

To give you an example what your own customers have to say about your business model:

I don't know all the details of the benchmark [3DMark 2003]; there may or may not be additional problems with how it works. All I know about is the way it does stencil shadows, which is just about unspeakably lame. What in particular pisses me off is that Futuremark seems to be suggesting, if not saying outright, that these scenes are comparable to Doom. They aren't. They aren't even *close* to what Doom does.

But the benchmark and what it does is really only half the story. The other half has to do with Futuremark's business model. I'll give you a hint: how does a benchmark company make money? I'll give you another hint: *not* by selling the benchmark to end users.

http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boa...287#Post167287


So, in the end the IHVs pay Futuremark for useless benchmarks directly and they have to waste additional resources with costly API call wrappers.
You say that 3DMark isn't useless? The point of 3DMark Vantage has been to predict performance of Direct3D 10 games, right? Well look for yourself: Computerbase.de

6 out of 12 misplaced performance predictions - a perfect random mean! But what else can you expect from a benchmark that creates scenes that are totally atypical for games?!
So people: Don't support Futuremark by using or even buying their benchmarks. You are hurting the game and graphics hardware industry by doing that!