Final Thoughts

Wrapping up this look at 3DMark, I'd like to say that I'm impressed. I wasn't completely blown away by the graphics of the new 3DMark, but there are some truly jaw-droppingly beautiful scenes in it which picked my enthusiasm right back up.

The customization allowed is huge, and the simple testing of the Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme benchmarks make it easier than ever to quickly test out your system to see how your results fare against the rest of the world.

The cross-platform friendliness that Futuremark are going after is going to pay off, big time. Being able to have a single benchmark for tablets, smartphones, notebooks, and PCs, is going to be great. It's going to bring everyone more together in the benchmarking scene and create a much more streamlined look at performance on a wide variety of devices. We've been told to expect the other platform versions "in weeks, rather than months".

I would love to see more social network interaction within 3DMark, where on the results page a "share to Facebook" button could be added. Clicking this button would automatically share it to your wall, where you could rub your new 3DMark score in your friends' faces, creating a more competitive vibe to 3DMark.

This would really help on smart devices, as they're much more social devices and a Facebook feature or Facebook integration would be great.

Overall, I love the new 3DMark and it is going to become a cornerstone of my benchmarks for TweakTown from now on. Good work, Futuremark!