3DMark06 Under the Magnifying Glass

Forward Looking - Looking Forward

We asked Nick about the future of game development and the future of Futuremark.

TOM'S HARDWARE: "The paper also states that you added a lot more lighting. We have spoken with people who state that flow control is going to help developers do more with lighting. Of course, each light may not contribute to the rest of the scene, but before flow control there weren't efficient ways to isolate lights outside the scene. For lighting outside the scene, say in an adjacent room, you can end up adding a zero value while there is a cost for doing this. With the "if" statement, you had to do all of the math before, even if it computed a zero, while now you can branch away from doing useless calculations. Do you feel that this is one component that future games will heavily depend upon for complex branching and shading?"

Nick: "It is very difficult to predict what game developers will use in their games. I mean, most games that will be out this year have already been in the pipeline for years, and new techniques and approaches are seldom incorporated into a game just before it ships. Game developers still have the luxury of using different rendering paths for all IHVs, and even for different generations of hardware of the same IHVs. In 3DMark06 we use one path for all IHVs and all hardware - except for hardware shadow mapping - and therefore, need to find a balanced mixture of everything. Without going into guessing what other developers will use, I think that the importance of Data Flow Control (DFC) may increase in the future."

TOM'S HARDWARE: "How did Futuremark incorporate flow control into 3DMark06? What optimizations did you code to really make flow control enhance the performance for IHV devices that can utilize this API feature?"

Nick: "All graphics tests in 3DMark need to contain a balanced mix of different features. There might be games out on the market in 2006 or 2007 that use some of the SM3.0 features to a higher extent than 3DMark06 does, but for us it is a matter of finding the right balance. In 3DMark06 we use a balanced amount of all SM3.0 features (DFC, large number of instruction slots, vPos register and so forth) in order to avoid "overuse" of only one or two specific features. Heavy use of only a couple of features would have made the graphics tests act more like "feature" tests and that's not something we want to do. We have a separate feature test suite for that."