3DMark 11 Software Review

Futuremark originally Founded in 1997 first hit the benchmark scene with there 3D Mark 99 benchmarking suite and since then has gone on to release new versions on a regular basis each time bringing all but the highest end PC's to there knees by pushing the boundary's and showing what the PC can really offer.

In 2009 Futuremark branched out and released Shattered Horizon, a zero gravity first person shooter, that again pushed PC's to the limits with stunning visuals.

3DMark seems to have become a staple benchmark these days, check out any GPU review online and chances are its being used, for me the simple output of a number makes it easy to gauge how fast your PC is when compared to results from other people.
In the past I have spent many hours overclocking and tweaking my system to get a few more points out of my 3DMark score, all in a effort to try and post the highest score on the leader boards with my setup in order to lengthen my e-peen.

The latest version aims to push DX11 cards to there limits and use as many DX11 features as possible such as tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Futuremark has made the benchmark available in a number of flavors, these are:-

• Basic Edition. This pretty much just includes the performance pre-set enabling you to do a run of the benchmark, upload your score and compare your result with others.
• Advanced Edition. This opens up most of the options which were previously unavailable, 3 pre-sets to benchmark against, Entry, Performance and extreme, there is also the options to run a custom test.
• Professional Edition. This adds a couple more features such as Demo looping, Image quality tool and Command line automation and is licensed for commercial use.

System requirements:-

OS:

Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7

Processor:

1.8GHz dual-core Intel or AMD CPU

Memory:

1 GB of system memory

Graphics:

DirectX 11 compatible graphics card

Hard drive space:

1.5 GB

Audio:

Windows Vista / Windows 7 compatible sound card

The benchmark consists of 4 graphical tests, a physics test and a combined physic and graphical test, the CPU is used for the physics.
The first two tests are based on the deep sea scene, the first using heavy lighting and no tessellation and the second one using medium lighting and tessellation.
The third and forth tests are based on the High Temple scene, the first featuring medium tessellation and one shadow and the fourth really cranking it up and featuring heavy tessellation and many shadows.

When I first ran the tests my initial reaction was "Holy Crap, this looks amazing!", I have to say I have never seen a game/benchmark to date with such impressive visuals.
Below are a number of screenshots from the various tests, I would however recommend downloading the benchmark and having a look for yourselves it really does look that good.

No doubt you readers will be interested in these results I got from our test machine which is the following spec:-

• Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8GHz 
• 6gb 1600MHz CL8 memory 
• Nvidia GTX 580 
• Corsair F160 SSD

Entry: E8813

Performance: P5788

Extreme: X1991

Conclusion:

3DMark 11 does a very good job of pushing the latest generation hardware to its limits, if you owna DX11 capable card and want something to benchmark it, so you can compare with your friends then I would definitely recommend the software.
I would also highly recommend just running the free version so you see what today's generation of GPU's are capable of. Sadly these days, there seems to be a lot of games being released that do not really push the hardware to it's limits like Futuremark can.

Pros:

Unrivalled visuals.

Cons:

Limited functionality in the basic version.