Futuremark has started talking about their next 3DMark publicly over at Beyond3D interview. The key feature and effect present in 3DMark2006 are Shader Model 3.0 support and HDR implementation that requires full SM3.0 support and FP16 textures & blending. Others cool implementations and changes include CSM (Cascaded Shadow Maps), soft shadows, heavier pixel processing load, increased arithmetic to texture ops ratio for the SM3.0 tests, at least 256MB of graphics memory to ensure no disk swapping, a new CPU test (most probably multi-core support).
According to our friends from HKEPC, some manufacturers have received a copy of 3DMark2006 Beta for internal testing but there is no scoring function yet in the beta copy for confidential reasons. There is particular game test in 3DMark06 which is similar to the Game Test 3 "Canyon Flight" of 3DMark05 but now it utilizes lots of HDR and SM3.0. Certainly the sea monster looks a lot better indeed from what we have seen. Things are not looking too rosy for ATi previous generation cards such as X300/500/600/700/800 that don't support SM 3.0 but it is fine for NVIDIA GeForce 6 series.
What kind of super computer are they using to render that....
