![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, February 12, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
3DMark03 Preview
The angry onion has been peeled back to reveal a new company name and a brand new 3Dmark as well. What does the future of synthetic benchmarking technology look like?
3DMark03 Benchmark:
These are the Minimum System Requirements for 3DMark03:
- Intel or AMD compatible processor that achieves a PCMark2002 CPU score over 2500 marks (corresponds to 1 GHz clock speed on some CPU architectures).
- 256 MB of system memory.
- 1 GB of hard disk space.
- DirectX 9 compatible graphics adapter that has 32 MB of memory and is fully DirectX 7 compliant.
- Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP operating system.
- DirectX 9 runtime installed.
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 installed, for some 3DMark functionality.
- Microsoft DirectX System Development Kit is required to run the image
quality test using the reference rasterizer.
As you can see this benchmark is built to take advantage of DirectX 9 and current hardware. A small portion of it can actually be run with DirectX 7 hardware but it is not meant to be a benchmark for DirectX 7. Most of the benchmark needs DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9 support in hardware. You can run this benchmark on a DirectX 8 card ala, GeForce3, 8500, GeForce4, but you do need DirectX 9 installed.
Even if you have a DirectX 9 video card and DirectX 9 drivers installed if you don’t have DirectX 9 itself installed you will get the error above and the benchmark will not run.
This is 3DMark03. As you can see they stuck with a small and simple to navigate program interface. Options can be selected from by clicking buttons. There are four fields listed from the program interface. One interesting quirk I found was that each time I opened 3DMark03 the CPU speed detected under the System field in the main menu would sometimes change. In the picture above it reads it at 2233Mhz, sometimes it would open and read it as 2228Mhz or 2220Mhz. The actual speed of the CPU in this system is at 13.5x166 which WCPUID is reading at 2245Mhz. This overall does not seem to be an issue, but is worthy of mention as it will surely be the basis of a forum argument or two.
Tests – This of course lists all the tests that can be used in the 3DMark run. These are only selectable in the Pro version. If you have the non pro version all of the tests supported are run by default in a 3DMark run. Only the Game Tests are used to calculate the final 3DMark score, the rest of the tests are there for detailed video card comparisons. Yes, there are sound tests now, but they are not supported in my screenshot because I had the sound card disabled on this test computer. We will skim over each test further in the article concentrating on the video side of the issue.
Settings – This is where you select the settings you would like for each benchmark run, also only available in the Pro version. From here you can select any resolution you would like to benchmark in. What is labeled as "Pixel Processing" are your selections for Anti-Aliasing and Post-Processing. Post-Processing includes 3D techniques, Depth of Field and Bloom filtering, done using 1.1 Pixel Shaders. Depth of Field is a technique we were introduced to back in the Voodoo 5 days which allows what you are focusing on in the foreground to be sharp and the background to be slightly blurred. Bloom is simply overbright, a very bright light that pours onto objects.
The Texture Filtering drop down box allows you to select Bilinear, Trilinear or Anisotropic filtering. If you choose Optimal 3DMark will use a mixture of Bilinear and Trilinear filtering depending on what objects will benefit most from the higher quality textures. You can also enable software Vertex shaders which means the CPU will do all of the Vertex work. This could be good if you want to stress and test CPU speed. The option is also there to run each test once or have it run multiple times. If you select multiple runs the result is the average of all the runs. You can loop the tests for stability testing as well. There is even a new option to cap the FPS at a certain number. This will not let the FPS exceed the number you input, whether VSYNC is disabled or not.
Image Quality Test – There is a full featured Image Quality test included in 3DMark03 only available with the Pro version. You can set the resolution, pixel processing and texture filtering you would like for each screenshot. Then you select the Test you would like to take a screenshot of. Probably the two best features of this screenshot test is that you can choose from any frame in any of the tests that you want to take a screenshot of. This way you are sure to get the exact same frame for every screenshot used in a comparison and it is completely up to you what frame you’d like to take. You can also take a sequence of screenshots. Just select the starting frame and the ending frame and hit Run and it will take screenshots in a series. In the third picture above I set it to take 25 frames in Mother Nature with 6X AA and 16X AF. In this manner you can create a slide show of sorts that can be very useful in comparisons.
Texture Filtering Test – Another new test is included that allows you to compare filtering in the Pro version. Select the resolution and Pixel Processing method you would like applied and then click Run and the Texture Filtering part starts. This gives you a basic texture to work with down a long passage way to evaluate Anisotropic and Anti-Aliasing on your video card. You can use the arrow keys to rotate and move down the tunnel so that you can see how moving the pattern affects AA and AF.
System Details – The System Info utility has been completely re-designed and now uses XML to easily view details about your computer. It opens up inside Internet Explorer and allows you to collapse and expand individual topics. You can see in the second picture above all of the information it gives you about your video card.
If you click the Demo button this will bring up the Demo settings box where you can select the resolution to run in (Pro version only), enable or disable sound and enable looping of the demo if you wish. The Demo does require Pixel Shader 1.1 as it uses this for its post-processing effects.