Thoughts
Futuremark's use of DST acceleration, in combination with single-cycle PCF filtering that's used for sampling of the DST, a method that has no part in PC-based DirectX and lies far outside Futuremark's previous claims that they'd not use vendor-specific extensions to render their 3D benchmarks on the PC, is the sticking point for me. That it's enabled by default on hardware that supports it is even more disagreeable. Combine that with the fact it reduces image quality (in my eyes) in the quest for performance, and we're back to a point we had during 03's lifetime, but this time it's supported by Futuremark and so it's valid in some respects.When you also understand that Futuremark declined to put 3Dc support into 3DMark05, something that'd help reduce vertex load on a vertex-fetch-limited benchmark, for the precise reason that it's not a part of DirectX, is galling. Neither is NVIDIA's DST+PCF method of PSM acceleration, so why's that in there?
3Dc is a ratified part of WGF 1.0. It'll at least be in DirectX at some point in the future. The same can't be said of the NVIDIA acceleration of PSMs in 3DMark05.
That it's a decent GPU-bound test that'd slot right into some kind of performance evaluation as far as I'm concerned, when partnered with valuable game-based benchmarks and other synthetic tests is invalidated by the current state of the benchmark and the technologies it includes (and discards) and how they're presented as sensible defaults.
DSTs need to be off when comparing NVIDIA hardware to ATI hardware using 3DMark05, something I'll be doing next week.
The various sub tests are great. The fillrate tests for example are better than they were in 3DMark03, and the batch size tests do indeed highlight issues uploading small vertex batches to the hardware, an issue in current drivers on modern hardware.
But the issues with the vendor-specific extensions and their effect on the benchmark make it hard to recommend, or indeed for HEXUS to use in our graphics card articles. We have a handle on its performance characteristics, essential in explaining how it uses a GPU for its performance, but that's not enough maybe.
It's a very pretty way to show off modern hardware, and Macci et al will love to race to 10K and beyond, but its use as a serious benchmark is let down by use of an accelerated method of PSM rendering that's yet to show its face on anything other than XBox and which isn't a standard part of DirectX, leaving its means as a rendering technique on PC games in the future in doubt, calling into question the reasons why that method of PSM rendering was ever included in the first place. Performance certainly seems to be one factor.
It remains to be seen how it'll pan out in the future, after all they're not called Futuremark for nothing, but the reasoning behind the way it was designed still needs to be investigated. Stay tuned.
