THG's Secret Test Sauces Revealed

3DMark 2003

3DMark03 from Futuremark.

Originally developed by Mad Onion, 3DMark 2003 is now marketed by Futuremark. The program is one of the best synthetic benchmarks for DirectX 8 graphics. It is synthetic in the sense that the tasks to be run are design solely for testing purposes. 3DMark is well known for exhausting practically all features in a graphic library.

Installation

You should either install the latest version immediately, or download Patch 3.6.0 from futuremark.com for earlier versions.

Settings

Once you've started 3DMark 2003, you can choose which CPU and game tests you want to run by going to 'Select.' As a general rule, we don't change the resolution or color depth so that we are also able to compare results from other systems.

Here you can choose which individual tests you want to run.

Benchmarking

Once you've chosen the tests, you can start them by clicking 'Run'. 3DMark can also be repeated in demo mode. The results are displayed in a separate window; 'Details' plays back the individual results.