3Dmark

i've seen all these 3Dmark 06's, 05's, and 03's but I have no idea what they mean and I thought it might be usfull to know now that Im getting ready to purchase a gaming laptop so it would be nice if somone could give me a simpletons guide to 3Dmarks. Or maybe a link to an online guide or something, or just explain it to me.

 

Basically, the different versions of 3DMark were designed to test the latest gaming technologies at the time. 3DMark03 I think was oriented around DirectX 7 gaming tech, 3DMark05 around DirectX8 gaming tech, and 3DMark06 DirectX9 gaming tech (I don't think there's a DX10 version yet).

The idea is generally to give people an idea of how well a computer and GPU would be able to handle current generation games, and how different setups compared to each other.

So you will see less people running 3Dmark03 benchmarks because they aren't as relevant (people buying PC's today don't have any concerns about how well old games will run, because they will all pretty much run as well as possible).

You now see people mainly running 3DMark05 and more commonly 3DMark06, because those scores at least theoretically give an idea of how well a machine might handle more modern games.

 

But don't expect a machine to perform in gaming as 3DMark might lead you to believe. 3DMark may give a high score to a system but that doesn't necessarily mean that machine will play real world games as well as other systems of the same 3DMark score.

Basically, I don't estimate how well a machine can play a game on 3DMark. A more accurate method of determining a system's real world performance is to read reviews and find out the kind of frame rates its getting.

 

Yeah, very good point. The best reviews usually include actual discussions of gameplay experiences, the settings they can run popular games at and still get smooth gameplay, etc.

 

3D Mark is an artificial benchmark, it says what something can do, not what it will do. Real benches usually differ from 3Dmark and PCmark.

 

Thus, that is why reviews usually include 3DMark's and gaming benchmarks as well. Not to mention other application tests also.

Mike.

 

True artificial so be careful but with that said here is link to a page on a sight, This page has a list of a lot of GPU's, the sight also has descriptions of many many cards it is one of the better sources as it splits cards into 5 or 6 categorizes. The people who write it seam to understand the GPU's here it is http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Would anybody agree 3DMark might have slight NVIDIA bias or am dreaming?