Futuremark Previews 3DMark 11

During all of my time spent working on Techgage, there’s one fact that I’ve come to realize. That fact is that at just about the time Futuremark’s current 3DMark benchmarking tool begins to become dominated by today’s hardware, and especially today’s overclockers, the company comes out of nowhere with an announcement of the next version, which is sure to bring even today’s highest-end PCs to their knees. At least, we can hope.

Although the benchmark saw a new release on a regular schedule back in the day, things have slowed down, and after 3DMark 06’s release in early 2006, we saw Vantage in the spring of 2008. This year, we’ll be seeing a return back to the year denotations with the launch of 3DMark 11, due out sometime this fall.

As you would expect, 3DMark 11 promises to deliver cutting-edge graphics, focusing heavily on DirectX 11 abilities. That means we can expect lots of tessellation, advanced computer shaders and even multi-threading capabilities. That’s about all the company is currently revealing about the product, but it promises to have a demo on display next week at Computex, so hopefully we can learn a bit more there.

To preview the upcoming version, Futuremark has uploaded a video to YouTube that showcases one of the tests, “Deep Sea”, which is rather self-explanatory. In it, submarines (interestingly, labeled with MSI’s logo) explore the depths. Throughout the demo, you can see where DirectX 11 comes into play. The tessellated surfaces almost look real!

3DMark 11 uses a native DirectX 11 engine designed to make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. 3Dmark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. 3DMark is trusted by gamers and enthusiasts worldwide to cut through marketing hype and technical jargon to give accurate and unbiased guidance for PC hardware purchasing decisions. Coming Q3 2010.