Unlike 3DMark and other complex benchmarks, this one offers quite good looks and performance to lower and more affordable segment of 3D market. Thanks to efficiency of OpenGL 2.0, a flyby scene featuring global illumination and penumbra shadows can run on mid-class hardware.
Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn't add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?
Before Lightsmark, realtime global illumination was limited to small scenes, small resolutions, small speeds, specially crafted scenes with handmade optimizations. Lightsmark breaks all limits at once, running in reasonably sized scene (220000 triangles) in high resolution (1680x1050) at excellent speed (100-400fps). Lighting is computed fully automatically in original unmodified scene from 2007 game World of Padman, not tweaked for Lightsmark and with all sorts of geometrical difficulties, with extra rooms hidden below floor etc
Version 1.2: workaround for Radeon HD2xxx driver bug, improved Vista compatibility, modding alowed, source code included
Version 1.1.1: 1280x1024 set as standard, one decimal place added, workaround for GeForce 5xxx, Go 6xxx, Go 7xxx driver bug, improved quality (shimmering)