FutureMark’s new business model, & more

Q: (Waiman)
Mr. Oliver Baltuch, firstly, as a leading industry enterprise, what do you think is the most competitive product or competitive superiority of FutureMark for now?

Oliver:
What Futuremark does very well is build benchmarks that are highly accurate and scalable for new technologies that truly measures the silicon in PC’s and Mobile devices.

Q: (Hafizan)
In my community, those softwares are the only benchmarking software that is considered because they have a free version. And those are the only creditable software that we use.
But FutureMark stop publishing the new 3Dmark in free version, (let’s forget the run-once stuff) Why company decide to do that?

Oliver:
The new model we started with PCMark® Vantage was to have a trial version for no cost and then a Basic Edition which could be used over and over for less than 5 Euros (less than the price of a computer gaming magazine or the sandwich that I buy while waiting in endless airports and train stations to travel to my next meeting). This gives us greater freedom to use higher end tooling (like Softimage XSI) and computers to really concentrate on delivering the kind of quality products that are expected by those same customers.

Q: (JEDIMASTER)
Will you release an update for future DX 11 or spend more money in making another benchmark for it?
Will you release an update for Advanced Physics testing?
Nvidia and ATI cards are close in performance in graphics so will you release an update so we can compare them in Physics?

Oliver:
My engineers would give me big problems if I told…sorry…

Q: (Victor)
Are there any possibilities for FutureMark to appear in Argentina as a sponsor?
So far I haven’t seen any events for enthusiasts where we can see what 3dMark is all about (not that I don’t know about it…but it would be cool if it was more widespread).

Oliver:
I would be delighted to participate with an Argentinean contest. Just let me know and send me an email. (As an aside we already participate in many places in the world.)

Q: (Hussain Al-Khalaf)
3D Mark is known to be Windows only benchmark, is there any plans to support other OS’s such as Linux & Mac?

Oliver:
We asked Apple, but, they declined our offer of participation.

Q: (Hussain Al-Khalaf)
There’s some points we have found that 3DMark lacks, for example, OpenGL benchmark, Sound Card features test, special test for mouse and keyboard (this will be great for hard-core FPS fans ).

Oliver:
ID and the OpenGL committee already make a great benchmark for OpenGL, Quake and Viewperf. The others are covered by internal tests at manufacturers.

Q: (ExodusC)
First off, why did Futuremark make the decision to change the naming scheme of the 3DMark series? I was really expecting/looking forward to seeing 3DMark08, not 3DMark Vantage.

Oliver:
Naming is always a difficult thing to do, but, in this case we wanted to ensure the long life of this product. If we named it 3DMark08 and then it was 2010, people might assume it was old even though it was still very useful for measuring DX10 cards.

Q: (bn)
Why named “Vantage”?

Oliver:
As a benchmark, we have a unique Vantage point from which to view the competition. Also, I wanted a V to go with Vista.

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