Thoughts
A brief look at 3DMark06 that we'll follow up on in the future, it hopefully shows you that it's well worth a download just to see the new look and new graphics test, which is gorgeous to look at it if nothing else. While the overall score remains fairly useless to us in some respects, that doesn't mean the benchmark has no merit. Far from it, as explained earlierIt still ranks hardware well in a general sense, which will keep PD happy. The feature tests are strong and we'll cover those in more depth when we get the chance, and as a tool for the average computer user interested in 3D performance, it works.
The last 3DMark before Vista and D3D10, 3DMark06 is a beautiful to look at update of the basics in 05, with lots of merit in the sub tests. As we said on page one, "each new version of 3DMark has been a great snapshot tool to rank graphics products almost as well as dozens of tools, games, and days of analysis do". That's still true.
Go forth and download, Futuremark have it available on their website, with the Advanced version not too expensive if you want to unlock some of the extra bits and pieces and go more in-depth on your own system.
Us? While you're playing the new mini game and dribbling at the image quality of the new and improved tests, we'll forge on with our tool to make using 06 even better as part of our labs suite.
