Futuremark released the newest installment to its 3DMark franchise. It's the first 3DMark to lack a version name, making it a "reboot" of sorts. For starters, the new 3DMark is a collection of three independent benchmark suites, each with its own demos, game tests, physics tests, and combined tests, and scoring.
Among the three suits are "Ice Storm," designed for tablets, mobile devices, and entry-level desktops, which needs nothing more than a DirectX 9.0c GPU to get going; "Cloud Gate," for notebook and home desktops, which needs a DirectX 10 feature-level GPU; and "Fire Strike," an over-the-top suite designed for today's gaming desktops, which can make even the fastest graphics cards sweat (for example, our GTX 680 in the screenshots below). The physics tests of each of these can benefit from having multiple cores and advanced instruction sets. TechPowerUp is a premier launch partner, hosting downloads on behalf of Futuremark. Grab yours below.
DOWNLOAD: 3DMark (2013)
The new 3DMark is available in various licensing options, a free version is for people to run the suites at default settings and view scores online; an advanced version that lets you view scores locally and compare scores online, and run tests with custom settings (for most gamers and enthusiasts); and a professional version for engineers, journalists, and reviewers, wanting to dissect each benchmark run, down to second-by-second details. 3DMark has its own data-logger that generates line graphs presenting multiple data points.
The new 3DMark is also the first cross-platform benchmark. Its Ice Storm suite is being ported to iOS, Android, and Windows RT, for people to bench graphics performance on a variety of new devices, making 3DMark the first major 3D graphics benchmark to set foot on the ARM platform. These versions will be released at a later date.