Another year, another version of Futuremark's 3DMark benchmarking software – except they skipped last year and dropped the year from the name. Whatever. The important thing is, fans of 3D graphics benchmarks everywhere now some new software that can bring your computer to its knees... and then some. 3DMark Vantage officially launched today, and we thought we would do a quick update on what has changed and some general commentary on the newest release.

In terms of changes, the most notable areas are the hardware and software requirements. Like PCMark Vantage, Windows Vista is required in order to run 3DMark Vantage. That's hardly a surprise, but simply installing Vista won't be sufficient; you also need to have a DirectX 10 capable graphics card. If you happen to run a system that's no longer on the cutting edge of hardware and software, you can simply forget about running 3DMark Vantage. We installed it on a system with a Radeon X1950 XTX, just to see what would happen. There were no warning messages during installation, which was surprising, but as soon as we loaded up 3DMark Vantage we were greeted by a software crash. It would probably be more effective if Futuremark alerted users to the fact that their hardware is inadequate rather than simply crashing; most likely they will address this with a future patch.

Besides having appropriate hardware and software, you will probably also want to update your graphics drivers. On the test system, the first time we executed the program, we encountered several error messages and some display corruption. We were running the Catalyst 8.3 drivers, and upgrading to 8.4 at least eliminated the display corruption on the loading screens. (The errors have been reported by others and may simply be a "first run" problem.) While we're on the subject, we might as well get the test hardware out of the way:

3DMark Vantage Initial Test System
Processor Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz 2x4MB cache)
Overclocked to 3.30GHz (1467FSB)
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6
Memory 2x2048MB OCZ DDR2-800
Running at DDR2-734 4-4-4-12
Graphics 2 x AMD Radeon HD 3870 (CrossFire)
Hard Drive Samsung F1 750GB (7200RPM 32MB)
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
.

While this is by no means the fastest gaming system on the planet, it just so happens to be my own personal gaming setup and it's more than sufficient for running any current game – though of course Crysis requires a few tweaks in order to run while. This is also not intended as a full benchmarking article, so we'll dispense with things like CPU clock speed scaling, CrossFire performance scaling, etc. This system runs 24/7 fully stable, and has been doing so for several months. (The system will be examined more closely in an upcoming article looking at various midrange gaming systems.)

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  • piroroadkill - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - link

    oh and 3DMark2001 is still my favourite of the lot
  • Griswold - Wednesday, April 30, 2008 - link

    I bet, it blends perfectly into the picture of "yesterdays world".
  • KHysiek - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - link

    that comes with Vantage. Now yout get hardly anything above nothing for free.
  • skinflickBOB - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - link

    I happen to run a business too. When I started out 11 years ago, I made one vow - to make profit - sl long as my means remained honest.

    Yeah, who'd want to earn money for a living eh?

    I suppose you go out and work for free too do you?

    Or lets all open up a business and not concentrate on charging for our services...

    It's a simple concept really - we don't have to buy it do we?

    Bob
  • michal1980 - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - link

    yes business provides a service. However 3dmark provides nearly nothing to an end user. It was only remotly popular for stability testing, and o.c. fanbois.

    You dont play 3dmark, no games are based off of it. And the only reason it was popular at all, is because its free. Now the limited version costs 7 bucks. For a bench mark progarm. phhff sorry, vantage is an epic fail.
  • BigLan - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - link

    Yeah, I saw it was released yesterday and was interested, but wanting $7 just to upload to the ORB?
  • Kyanzes - Friday, May 2, 2008 - link

    It's a major suckage that you have to pay for providing statistical data. I certainly won't pay for this "service", lol. 450MB download for a run-once benchmark? Stick it up to where it belongs.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - link

    Article updated (page 2). Honestly, I never even realized the new registration system until I saw this comment. Ouch. Okay, so $20 is not that big of an expense - especially if you're already spending thousands of dollars to try and top the ORB charts - but with the included advertising it seems the Basic mode at least should have remained free.
  • AssBall - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - link

    You missed the point totally while you were preaching your personal business ideals. He said they changed it so you get nothing with the free version anymore.

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