Can 3DMark stand in the middle?

Q: (Wangist6)
There is a “Sapphire” logo in the first test scene for 3Dmark Vantage. Does this mean FutureMark will introduce more commercial elements for the products such as 3Dmark Vantage? How would you retain justice of the testing products such as 3Dmark Vantage after introducing more commercial elements?

Oliver:
We operate in the same way that a website such as Expreview operates. There is a rule that sales and marketing does not interfere with the technical side of the business, just like at Hardware websites, even if they are getting rich on advertising from a hardware vendor, they always report the performance of the hardware as they see it so that their consumers always benefit.

Q: (Sean)
Do you feel that your relationship with hardware manufacturers in any way qualifies the results of your benchmarks as being objective representations of video card or cpu performance?
Additionally, in allowing manufacturers to contribute to the development of your software, how do you keep those manufacturers who do participate from gaining a significant advantage in optimization over those who might not? Is it problematic that these manufacturers are optimizing for a synthetic benchmark, which no one can “play,” versus actual games for which optimization at least directly benefits the consumer?

Oliver:
Keep it in mind of Futuremark’s transparency system. Any one of our Benchmark Development partners can visit Finland and see the source code in our offices to ensure that nothing has been hidden that may cause an imbalance in the fairness of the benchmark.

Q: (muggie2)
Given the problems that existed in the past, with manufacturers trying to “tweak” their performance solely for 3DMark, how do you envisage the future battles between Futuremark trying to deliver an honest and comprehensive benchmark and manufacturers trying to manipulate their scores and use your product as a marketing tool?

Oliver:
The semiconductor companies are actually very professional and these days they spend their time working at making games better. Sometimes that will affect the benchmarks positively, but, in the whole it always makes games better.

Q: (Elwin)
As the yardstick of measuring graphics device’s efficiency, how does 3Dmark ensure as high representativeness as possible among several game tests? In another word, how does Futuremark predict the trend of game and D3D API in the coming a period of time?

Oliver:
Although 3DMark Vantage is a synthetic test, it is intended to represent what technology and level of experience games will utilize in the future and on that front it does very well. We also work with a large number of members to ensure that this occurs.

Q: (ripken204)
Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI are all talking about using different technologies, such as Ray Tracing, how are these types of things suppose to fit in? It sounds like a coder’s nightmare and it may be hard to even compare some of these future video cards by using just numbers. Please shed some light on some of these questions. I would like to see 3DMark last for years to come and it would be nice to know what you guys are planning.

Oliver:
Yes, all the new technologies coming out may seem like a difficulty, but, it our engineers and scientists job to work with the hardware vendors and to get it right. From what we are currently seeing in all the reviews on the web, 3DMark Vantage seems to be scaling correctly with all the new GPU hardware including SLI and Crossfire.

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