Futuremark has revealed the first information on its next generation PCMark system benchmark and testing suite which goes under the name of Vantage. This is the first version of PCMark that has been designed for Windows Vista and it won't even run on XP. A range of new features have been added since the previous version and considering that it has been two years since the last version of PCMark. Vantage works with notebooks, desktops and even workstations and there is support for both 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista.

The system requirements are quite high as well, beyond your PC being able to run Vista that is. First of all Vantage demands a 3GHz single core CPU, but Futuremark is recommending a multi-core processor, so we should see some nice quad core support here and hopefully even support for dual socket systems. You also need 1GB of system memory which will rule out some people, although if you're running Vista with less than 1GB of memory, then we're feeling sorry for you.

The graphics card requirements consists of minimum Shader model 2.0 support, but shader model 3.0 is required for the GPU image manipulation test, yeah we don't know exactly what that test is either. Futuremark is also recommending a graphics card with at least 256MB of memory for the gaming test.

For now that's all the information that's available on the Futuremark site apart from a little blurb about who PCMark Vantage is meant for and why you should spend money on it. Anyhow, you can find some more info, over at the PCMark Vantage website