Questions from overclock communities

Q: (Dinos22)
I’d love to know if Futuremark will reconsider re-spinning 3DMARK2001.
This benchmark is THE most popular with extreme benchers because of the required level of skill of tweaking your system/RAM speed & latency/FSB/OS/benchmark running order/LOD etc…
Newer benchmarks hardly have that sort of involvement and amount of tweaking….
Would Futuremark consider such an idea as we are heading into GPU dominated computing world with some crazy new technology being released very soon?

Oliver:
Hmmm…even though people love 3DMark2001, because they use it as a CPU test, I really have to say that it only tests Microprocessor frequency because it is not multi-threaded. On the other hand 3DMark Vantage is designed to scale really well with lots of CPU Cores, CPU Frequencies and CPU Cache Sizes making it far better for your CPU testing. Over the next ten years, my guess is that I will be asked the same question about 3DMark Vantage as you just asked about 3DMark2001.

Q: (loonym)
There is no other DX10 benchmark in the league with 3DMarkVantage. Do you think further changes could be implemented to gain more widespread acceptance by the overclocking enthusiast community?
Perhaps implementing anti-cheat schemes such as mip-map cheats like nvhard mip disable. I don’t know if hwbot will ever fully add a bench that has the associated cost but more cheat control would give the bench better credibility.

Oliver:
We have internal tools to ensure that the drivers that we authorize are correct and stay to our rules. We have other sets of tools as well to keep people from exaggerating their scores. But, we also feel that the overclocker community is sufficiently polite that they will adhere to the rules of gentlemanly practices and if not most of the friends will let them know that it’s not cool to fudge your score.

Q: ([cTx]Warboy)
To get right to the point. I’m a gamer. I want to know how on par 3DMark Vantage is going to be with DirectX 10 Gaming, Leaving merge for how well the game is coded and such. Anyone can make a benchmark, but how accurately can it benchmark gaming performance and then pure performance. I know a lot of overclockers know there is a large difference between what you get in a game as terms of performance and what you get in benchmarking software.

Oliver:
The main difference that a benchmark brings is that it not intended as a balanced approach like a game. Games are made to stay as far as possible from the edges of the silicon. Benchmarks are built to find those edges, so that Hardware and Driver developers can know where they are and refine their technology. That way when a game comes along and touches one of those edges, the hardware and driver engineers are ready.

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