Quote Originally Posted by dinos22 View Post
who says it doesnt have to use a specific preset but without needing to run a complete run. surely the program can be designed to detect change of preset if a bencher decided to get smart............
One thing that has been corrected is the length of the run.

In 3DMark 11 you have two demo parts, four graphics test (GPU benchmark) parts, one CPU test and one CPU-GPU combined test. You can choose to run the whole thing (default), just the demo or just the score-producing parts and the score-producing bits are fairly short - we know people may end up running the benchmark 20 or 30 times over the course of the day and the goal was to keep the actual score-producing part short and to-the-point. Note that even the free Basic version offers the choice between "whole thing", "demo only" and "benchmark only".

Unfortunately the 3DMark score itself is calculated from all six tests, so you have to run them all to produce a 3DMark score (and you have to use one of the default presets). However, you can run any demo or test part independently (advanced version) - just without a composite 3DMark score since there isn't required data to calculate it.

And yes, there are a ton of things you can tweak to drill down to differences between hardware setups with individual tests and custom settings. There just isn't a composite 3DMark Score in such cases because, again, it requires data from all six tests and default preset settings.