Futuremark has announced that its benchmark tool, 3D Mark, is now fifteen years old. The first 3D Mark benchmark tool was released in 1998, when Microsoft released Windows 98, Apple sold the first iMac, and the world was introduced to a new search engine called Google. 3D Mark supported DirectX 6 and since then, Futuremark has released 11 versions of 3DMark, each one pushing hardware to the limit to demonstrate the potential of the latest graphics APIs.
As Futuremark told us, every version of 3DMark going back to 3DMark99 is available to download from its website. What’s more interesting is that in order to celebrate the 15th anniversary of 3DMark, Futuremark is giving away a pair of Fire Strike monster statues created by 3D printing the model used in 3DMark.
Regarding the older 3D Mark benchies, Futuremark has this to say:
“This anniversary is a good time for us to review our current lineup. As a result, we are moving 3DMark03, 3DMark05 and 3DMark06 to our list of unsupported products since they no longer provide meaningful results with modern graphics hardware. As Microsoft will soon be ending support for Windows XP, we are retiring PCMark05 as well.”
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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