http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3dmark-vantage,1919.html

Awesome article. Some of the new features are great. The dual/quad cpu scaling is nice and the optimization is pretty cool. The new videos are pretty neat.

Quote :

"Another big change is that instead of the single, overall score used in preceding versions, "Presets" are available (and compulsory) with Vantage. Each one is intended to change not only the resolution but also the graphics load (like the quick adjustments in game options) and thus affects the score. Futuremark provides for calibration to suit the video memory (the first Preset, Entry, is aimed at graphics cards having 128 MB of memory and the Performance Preset is geared for 256 MB of memory). Those were the only Presets available in the Basic edition, which is what we tested. "

Thought that was cool too. For you guys who bench your computers this is awesome. For those of you who think benching is stupid and pointless please save me the comments.

[Edited on April 28, 2008 at 5:58 PM. Reason : .]

4/28/2008 5:52:09 PM

this is stupid. what's the point?

:p

4/28/2008 6:33:09 PM

from the article :

Quote :

"The bottom line is that there isn’t much that’s really new in this new version of 3DMark, which looks very much like the previous versions, but with additional limitations (no free version and a single overall score, and the addition of the Presets, which will probably make comparisons more difficult). So we don’t see any more reason than we ever had to include it in our graphics-card test series, given its fundamentally artificial nature."

and

Quote :

"3DMark’s goal has always been to simulate the demands future games will make before the fact and to determine the resulting hierarchy of graphics cards. However, it has failed in that goal, as the results of 3DMark06 show - it favors AMD cards over Nvidia’s and does not offer reliable benchmarks for most current games. Not to mention 3DMark’s rendering, which hasn’t evolved and is still "cartoonish."

Seriously, you have to pay 7 bucks just to use it at all? Garbage before, still garbage.

4/28/2008 6:33:43 PM

lol i know. videos seem cool. There's a free trial version online i'm gonna try out. You get one free score submission.

4/28/2008 6:54:37 PM

haha 15,598 scores already online.

Top score had x2 Intel Core 2 Extreme X9775s at 4249Mhz (8 cores) on a Intel Dual Socket desktop board. With quad gpu 9800 GX2s. Some people spend waaaaay too much money on hardware just for benching.

i fail:
http://service.futuremark.com/resultAnalyzer.action?resultId=16322&resultType=19

4/28/2008 7:45:57 PM