FutureMark has just made their latest installment of the popular 3DMark benchmarking series available to the masses, known as "3DMark Vantage".

Being FutureMark's first DX10 only benchmarking suite, it will only run on Windows Vista based PCs. Vantage is made up of four full benchmarking tests (two CPU and two GPU tests) along with six individual feature tests.

If you're keen to give the 450MB trial version a shot, you'll be wanting some pretty serious hardware in your rig to begin with; unless slideshows and triple digit final scores don't bother you, that is. It would also appear that from looking across many early test results, the NVIDIA crowd are slightly better off with substantially better scoring at the top end.

Several sites around the web have checked Vantage out in detail since its release a few hrs ago, you can find the coverage via the below links :-

- Hardware-mag
- PCGamesHardware
- Technic3D
- Accelnation
- PC Perspective
- Hot Hardware
- TweakPC
- Legit Reviews
- The Inquirer
- Toms Hardware

Espoo, Finland - April 28th, 2008 - Futuremark (www.futuremark.com) brings users one step closer to understanding the performance potential of their personal computers with the launch of 3DMark® Vantage. Gamers, media and OEMs now have a modern gaming performance benchmark to measure native DirectX 10 and multi-core CPU performance with large amounts of physics, AI and graphics.

3DMark® Vantage was created by a select group of Futuremark artists and engineers working in close cooperation with the Benchmark Development Program (BDP) members [Ageia, AMD, Compal, Dell, Gateway, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Sapphire Technology, Velocity Micro, Vivante Corp., Qimonda] , "3DMark smashes out of the box in delivering a view to virtual reality that pushes the performance envelope of the latest in PC Hardware for years to come." said Jukka Mäkinen Ph.D., Vice President of the PC Business Unit at Futuremark. "Consumers to professionals will be able to get immediate comparisons with thousands of others using our online results browser, helping them to fully understand the results and how they can improve their computer's gaming performance potential."