Introduction

In the realm of benchmarking one name stands out as THE company to go to for your benchmark. That company is Futuremark. Since the first release of their 3DMark test they have been the ones to turn to when it comes to benchmarking not only your GPU, but in many cases your entire system.

But things have not always been pizza and beer for the gang at Futuremark. They have had their share of criticism levels at them. In Futuremark's Vantage they chose to go all DX10 and also to include the Ageia PhysX API. This was perfectly fine until NVIDIA bought the struggling company and enabled the API to run on their GPUs. This gave every NVIDIA GPU an unfair advantage in many people's eyes.

The fact that Futuremark put that in there before NVIDIA bought Ageia escaped most people. Now Futuremark is back at it with a new Graphics test; 3DMark 11. This test changes a few things and once again will surely get Futuremark in trouble with both of the big GPU houses.