Futuremark Releases 3DMark 11 Update

Since Futuremark released the latest version of its 3DMark benchmark, “11”, over 200,000 submissions have been entered into the central database, and I’m sure that number will hit 1,000,000 before we know it. Earlier this month, we took a hard look at the latest version, and overall were pleased. But, there were a couple minor things we wished were different, and well… those are now things of the past.

The biggest gripe we had was that to see the individual test scores, you had to submit the score to Futuremark’s website, which was tedious and needless. “Professional” users had it a bit better, where they could save and export the results file, but that’s far from being ideal either, since to do it is even more tedious than simply uploading results to the site.

We apparently weren’t alone in not liking this implementation, because the company just last week remedied it with a patch, and at the same time handled some other bugs and feature tweaks. In another minor improvement, the benchmark UI is now minimized during runs, which is perfect for those who are actually watching it for enjoyment. Also, an automatic update notification has been introduced. It’s not often that a new version of any Futuremark benchmark is released, but that makes this even more useful, since you won’t have to check the website at all to check for a newer version.

One thing the 3DMark 11 update doesn’t affect is the overall scores, so it’s recommended that you grab the latest version from the official site and update as soon as possible.

It’s almost a week since we released 3DMark 11 and we’re rapidly closing on 200,000 result submissions from eager overclockers around the world. Unfortunately such wide scale use has brought to light a few issues that weren’t caught by our own testing. So today we are releasing an update to 3DMark 11 to fix those problems and add a couple of requested features. Note, until NVIDIA release new drivers SLI will continue to be unavailable in 3DMark 11.