3DMark06 review

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The Verdict

Copyright 2005 - Guru3D.comWell folks, there you have it. Don't you just love what the new updated '06 has become? The numbers though, well, the GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB, which is not the cheapest card on the market by any means, simply CRAWLS and struggles to complete this benchmark with acceptable framerates. The score was 4000 3DMarks. Yikes! Your high-end hardware almost looks low-end performance wise.

That being said I feel that the new '06 is finished, complete and exactly what it should be. The new features introduced are breathtaking and the end-result is looking astounding. We can only hope to play games in such an environment. We as reviewers can use this software as always in a good manner, have plenty of options to check image quality and for you the end user it's that magic "number" that scales so perfectly. The new update is complex, versatile and produces eye-candy on the screen that we all want to see in our games. My personal highlights in the new '06 is the HDR refraction and reflection effects, dynamic softshadows and most of all the heterogeneous fog effect, which hopefully will bring an incredible cinematic effect to future games.

3DMark06 stresses the graphics card to its extreme and is setting the industry standard, yet it pushes graphics chip designers to the next level as it is raising the bar a little further. As always Guru3D.com is pleased to get this software to you for free (freeware version) through our downloads servers. Things might be a tad slow though as the download is a massive 550MB file. Over the next 24 hours our servers will become more relaxed, if not today then download it tomorrow. We assigned additional bandwidth to most of our file-servers to be able to handle the load.

Well then, when will the next 3DMark for Windows XP be released you ask? There will be none. The next version is being designed for Microsoft's up and coming Windows Vista.

With that being said, two thumbs up to the Futuremark team for once again launching a successful synthetic benchmark that will be widely accepted by the industry, the consumer and yours truly as we'll continue using the software in all our graphics cards reviews.

You'd better have a kickass DirectX 9 graphics card though otherwise you might end up in tears when you see that score.

Contest

To celebrate this release of 3DMark06 we will be giving away ten advanced licenses and ten Futuremark T-Shirts. What do you have to do? Simple. Answer this easy question:

  • how many game demo's does 3DMark06 have ?

CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED

There are no limitations to Europe or something. It doesn't matter where you live, we'll ship it there as long as there is a postal service!

The contest will close on January the 31st. Entries after that date will be ignored. You can only enter the contest once !

----

A couple of days ago our well visited Futuremark 3DMark06 contest closed. It's time to announce the winners. Congratulations to all twenty of you, you have been contacted by email by the time you read this. The answer was of course, four technology / game demos.

The licenses you should have received by now through e-mail. The T-Shirts will be shipped on Monday if you included your full address as requested that is. If you didn't do so, don't worry .. you have been contacted and asked to resubmit your address.

10x 3DMark06 Advanced License
 
10x Futuremark t-shirt
 
  • Ricardo Faria
  • Rod Rhodes
  • Jon Minchin
  • Greg Harker
  • Peter Bujna
  • Hoder Jensen
  • Jamie Allan
  • Mohamed Shuman
  • Leon Durham
  • Tomi Antikainen
  • Jake Milner
  • Tony Reker
  • Bill Fossatti
  • Paul de Jong
  • Peter Kolani
  • Vivian Eves
  • Dave Dee
  • Duane Lisboa
  • Tim Holler
  • Leslie Thaut

Congratulations !

3Dmark06 - Copyright 2005 - Guru3D.com

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