- Joined
- Mar 6, 2011
- Messages
- 8,643
I realized today, not only did I buy the 2013 release of 3DMark at some point, Futuremark actually did a damn good job with this release. New laptop meant new time for benchmarks, even though this thing can't game I still want to know how much bang I got for my buck. One of the things on my list is comparing it to my 4 year old gaming laptop which is a DX10 card. I thought I was going to have to break out the old 3DMark Vantage on all the machines to compare... not so much.
Resolution Issues
If you have ever wasted time benchmarking junk like I do you have probably run into the issue that 3DMark 11 and older had. The lower the resolution, the higher the score. Its kind of troublesome to compare scores on a laptop that is say 1600x900 and a desktop with at least a 1080P monitor.
Real world versus benchmark aside last years 3DMark apparently solved this. They render at full resolution intended for the particular test and scale to the screen. There might be a small performance penalty for the scaling but the scores are much more comparable.
Not DX11 Only
DirectX 11 was an interesting release. It runs on DX9 10 and 11 hardware and brings performance improvements to at least 9. This is actually how the DX11 version of STO runs, its a DX11 render engine but its making DX9 specific calls only. Ice Storm is a DX9 benchmark, Cloud Gate is a DX10 benchmark and Fire Storm is DX11, all running an engine written against the DX11 library. So I can compare all my junk without breaking out old versions.
Mobile
Your still reading this shit? People laugh at laptop gaming even though the current top end laptop GPU beats out a GTX 770. Price is the suck but yes laptops can game if you really need to pick up and go (looking at you soldiers). But the hardware for true portable gaming is coming of age and its kinda nice to be able to compare a mobile device running the same software as its desktop counter top, even if its not so nice to play on it.
Anyways if any of you geeks were behind the times like I apparently was yesterday, consider yourself informed. The rest, bored to death.
Resolution Issues
If you have ever wasted time benchmarking junk like I do you have probably run into the issue that 3DMark 11 and older had. The lower the resolution, the higher the score. Its kind of troublesome to compare scores on a laptop that is say 1600x900 and a desktop with at least a 1080P monitor.
Real world versus benchmark aside last years 3DMark apparently solved this. They render at full resolution intended for the particular test and scale to the screen. There might be a small performance penalty for the scaling but the scores are much more comparable.
Not DX11 Only
DirectX 11 was an interesting release. It runs on DX9 10 and 11 hardware and brings performance improvements to at least 9. This is actually how the DX11 version of STO runs, its a DX11 render engine but its making DX9 specific calls only. Ice Storm is a DX9 benchmark, Cloud Gate is a DX10 benchmark and Fire Storm is DX11, all running an engine written against the DX11 library. So I can compare all my junk without breaking out old versions.
Mobile
Your still reading this shit? People laugh at laptop gaming even though the current top end laptop GPU beats out a GTX 770. Price is the suck but yes laptops can game if you really need to pick up and go (looking at you soldiers). But the hardware for true portable gaming is coming of age and its kinda nice to be able to compare a mobile device running the same software as its desktop counter top, even if its not so nice to play on it.
Anyways if any of you geeks were behind the times like I apparently was yesterday, consider yourself informed. The rest, bored to death.