Time to Punish Your Android: Futuremark’s 3DMark Has Landed in the Play Store

The state of benchmarking tools for mobile platforms is still very-much in its infancy, and up to this point, there have been few that have really pushed through the limits of what our hardware is capable of. My favorite benchmark up to this point has to do with gaming, Epic Citadel, as it simply looks gorgeous and runs well on most every device I’ve run it on. But “runs well” is the distinction that most people are not going to like – benchmarks should stress, after all.

On the PC side, Futuremark has done a great job of delivering benchmarks that do just that. Whenever a new 3DMark drops, it’s not too surprising to see it run at around 10 FPS on most current PCs, with only the beefiest of rigs out there – those that include multiple GPUs – that can get by fairly smoothly. If sub-30 FPS is fairly smoothly, that is.

With the latest iteration of 3DMark, we knew that Futuremark would be porting it over to mobile platforms, and today, the Android side of things has been taken care of – and for those that were worried, this solution costs $0.00. As mentioned in previous posts, scores between mobile devices and desktops are 100% comparable, so this really blows the doors open wide for cross-platform benchmarking. Of the three tests featured in the company’s desktop 3DMark, Ice Storm is the only one that makes its way here – primarily because it is what was designed for OpenGL use.

Here are a couple of live screenshots I took, while running the benchmark on the Nexus 7 (using the Extreme profile):

After one of the tests are run, the results screen will appear that breaks-down each test component result while also presenting a comparison to show you how your device compares to others on the market. The non-Extreme Ice Storm score for the ASUS Transformer Prime was 3607, while the Nexus 7 fell not too far behind at 3452.

It’ll be interesting to see how these scores fare once Tegra 4 and its competitors hit the market. If you decide to run the benchmark, hit up the comments with your results! For those running Windows RT or iOS, your version should be seen soon.