3DMark2001 had rudimentary image quality tools available to it; however these have been expanded on in 3DMark03. There are now two image quality tools available, with the ‘Image Quality’ tool, that allows you to take captures from the tests themselves, and the Texture Filtering test.

Whereas 3DMark2001 would capture a single static image from each of the game test, 3DMark03 allows the user to select any frame they wish from each of the tests and save the output. All the various IQ options are available for selection (i.e. resolution, filtering etc.) and the user can either select to capture a single frame or a range of frames.

The Texture Filtering option can is a synthetic tool used to highlight the particular texture filtering methods IHV’s employ in their hardware, as implementations of texture filtering, especially with Anisotropic Filtering, can differ from one vendor to the next. The tool has similar functionality to SamX’s Anitostropic Filtering test tool, which can be found here.

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Further Tests

One of the intentions behind 3DMark03 was to minimise the system dependence by transferring as much of the 3D load as possible directly to the graphics board. However, because 3DMark is often used for system testing, Futuremark have included a separate CPU test as a determinant for CPU performance.

The CPU test uses the Game Test 1 and 3 running at 640x480 with software Vertex Shaders, Game Test 3 also has dynamic shadows disabled as well as PS1.4 functionality removed. These settings should isolate the graphics cards from the CPU scores, however it does mean that a DX8 graphics card will be required for the second scene.

Similar to the main 3DMark score, a CPU score is now calculated and reported via the following criteria:

The tests are weighted such that they both attribute to 50% of the score.

New to 3DMark03 is the 3D sound test, which has been designed to evaluate the performance impact of using 3D sound sources.

The test features a scene similar to that of Game Test 1, with the positions of the various plans dictating the 3D sound positioning. The sound sources are taking from the guns, engines and explosions within the scene. The scene is then run with zero, 24 and 60 sound sources and the frame rate from can be used to evaluate how effective the sound card is from reducing the load of the CPU on to the sound board.

It would certainly seem that 3DMark03 is a highly comprehensive benchmarking suite for the latest generation of Shader enabled graphics boards, and yet manages to stay closer to an actual gaming environment that may be seen the coming years. It also offers a number of tests outside of the standard 3D graphics performance which could assist in benchmarking many different element of the PC that are utilised during gaming.

No doubt Beyond3D will soon be utilising elements from this benchmark in upcoming tests and reviews.

Our thanks to Futuremark's Tero Sarkkinen, Patric Ojala and Nicklas Renqvist.

Note: Original screen captures taken with ATI Radeon 9700 PRO with 6X FSAA and 16X Trilinear Anisotropic Filtering