3DMark06 Under the Magnifying Glass

Shadow Rendering And High Dynamic Range

In 3DMark05 there were three game tests: Return to Proxycon, Firefly Forest and Canyon Flight. All three of these are reused in 3DMark06 with modifications. The first two are still Shader Model 2 tests, but they have been enhanced; they can use hardware shadow acceleration with Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF), which is supported on Nvidia hardware and was introduced on ATI X1000 series cards with Fetch4. In Return to Proxycon, Futuremark added more light sources, and for both, it had the scenes use higher shadow map resolutions.

Moving back to HDR, Futuremark took the Canyon Flight game test and overhauled it. They converted it from Shader Model 2 to Shader Model 3. They increased the shader code length to incorporate very nice "eye candy" improvements to the water, the creature, and the lighting. HDR is the key for both Canyon Flight and the new game test entitled Deep Freeze, which is a simulation of a sunset at an abandoned Antarctic installation. This test makes use of shader techniques to simulate the lighting changes as the sun is setting.