Introduction and First Look

The original 3DMark came out all the way back in 1998, a huge 15 years ago now and arrived as 3DMark99. This, at the time, ushered in a totally new era of testing out your PC. I would've run that bad boy over a thousand times without a problem. Back in those days, we were in three-digit MHz processors, less than 512MB of RAM, and barely even had dedicated 3D graphics cards.

It was a time when 3DFX were the shiznit, and 3D graphics were just going more mainstream on PC. After that we saw releases of 3DMark pretty quickly, moving into the mainstream and being used by enthusiasts and gamers alike to test their systems out. This can be for entertainment purposes, or to test your new overclock on your CPU or GPU.

I've always found 3DMark to be the best test to see how you score against similarly speced PCs as yours. For example, you've just purchased a brand new Radeon HD 7970 GPU and you feel performance in games isn't what you've seen online. Download and install 3DMark and compare it to tech sites or other users' 3DMark scores and if you come close - you're all good - but if you don't, you know something is wrong.

Fault finding until you reach scores within 5-10% of a similar system online, and you're on the right track. That's how I've personally used 3DMark over the years, but now Futuremark are stepping in a truly different direction: multi-platform benchmarking.

The new 3DMark we're testing out today is for Windows, but there will be an Android, iOS and Windows RT versions released shortly. We've just downloaded a copy of the new 3DMark ahead of the public release to take a look at how it runs, the tests included and just a quick rundown of what to expect from the latest benchmarking software we'll all become accustomed to over the coming years. And we aren't missing anything here, the new 3DMark is simply called "3DMark", no numbers or naming after it.