3DMark 2001 SE released

[tornadobox]

Heheh, I stand corrected! Those pesky manuals!

 

[oldfart]

Yup, if you want to run a bench, you can just run the game tests and not have to wait for all the other stuff to finish.

 

[tornadobox]

now if only that stupid online result browser was working...

 

[Pariah]

Answers from MadOnion's faq:

"Because the only difference between original and SE is 20 second "advanced pixel shader demo" that shows reflective water."

A: 3DMark2001 SE is our DX8.1 benchmark and it does require that DX8.1 is installed.

Basically, DirectX 8.1 support is the new feature.

"The scores should be within 3% and directly comparable (unless you have Kyro card)."

A: 3DMark2001 SE and 3DMark2000 are not comparable. We changed the scoring system in 3DMark2001 SE.

It's quite likely that the review sites will all adopt the new version, so that's the reason to dl it, if nothing else.

 

[Rand]

It adds one new DX8 test, called "Advanced Pixel Shaders", it adds support for DXT1 texture compression, and it also fixes the rendering into textures bug that artifically limited the Kyro 1/2's score. It also optimizes Dynamic shadow rendering.

According to MO the vast majority of non-Kyro based systems and graphics cards supporting 32bit compressed textures should see no performance difference outside of the 3% margin of error.

In advanced pixel shaders, the R8500 is supposed to perform better then the GF4 as it can render the scene in one pass compared to the two passes required by the GF4.