http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18114
"EVEN THOUGH IT'S CALLED 3Dmark05 we have confirmation that this test will see the light of the day in around two weeks.
It's almost finished and we managed to hear about it even though Futuremark is extremely conservative company when it comes to NDAs and information leaks.
Some initial test show that the beta favours Nvidia over ATI cards, but we've also heard the opposite. I guess we will have to wait and see who will be faster.
The new 3Dmark comes after Futuremark's normal way of thinking; whenever anyone gets close to 15000 or more marks they just start all over again.
The developers could not wait for Shader Model 4 and Longhorn as it would take too. They went for Shader Model 3.0 and introduced a new test. After all Shader Model 3.0 is the most advanced Shader supported in DirectX 9.0c.
They waited for the new DirectX but all they got was 9.0c.
A similar thing happened years back with 3Dmark01SE when there were two versions of the same test, the one with DirectX 8.0 and the second one with ATI's DirectX8.1 support. Then, we were talking about Shader 1.1 that Nvidia adored, versus ATI's Shader 1.4
It's funny to remember that Nvidia's key argument at that time against Shader model 1.4 was that it would render a scene in less passes and would end up faster while the picture quality would be the same as on 1.1. "
"EVEN THOUGH IT'S CALLED 3Dmark05 we have confirmation that this test will see the light of the day in around two weeks.
It's almost finished and we managed to hear about it even though Futuremark is extremely conservative company when it comes to NDAs and information leaks.
Some initial test show that the beta favours Nvidia over ATI cards, but we've also heard the opposite. I guess we will have to wait and see who will be faster.
The new 3Dmark comes after Futuremark's normal way of thinking; whenever anyone gets close to 15000 or more marks they just start all over again.
The developers could not wait for Shader Model 4 and Longhorn as it would take too. They went for Shader Model 3.0 and introduced a new test. After all Shader Model 3.0 is the most advanced Shader supported in DirectX 9.0c.
They waited for the new DirectX but all they got was 9.0c.
A similar thing happened years back with 3Dmark01SE when there were two versions of the same test, the one with DirectX 8.0 and the second one with ATI's DirectX8.1 support. Then, we were talking about Shader 1.1 that Nvidia adored, versus ATI's Shader 1.4
It's funny to remember that Nvidia's key argument at that time against Shader model 1.4 was that it would render a scene in less passes and would end up faster while the picture quality would be the same as on 1.1. "
