3DMARK 99 MAX Professional Edition Review

UPDATE 11/28/99: The guys over at MadOnion.com sent me two new screen shots that are only being sent to their favorite people. They also said that 3DMark2000 is almost ready and that no betas are being sent out until everything is tweaked. These pictures are incredible (will take some time to load).

Original Review

The company formerly known as Futuremark was kind enough to send me a copy of their newest program 3DMARK 99 MAX Professional Edition, in addition to a pair of socks. By the way, for those of you who don’t know Futuremark created the 3DMARK bench-test program which is now the standard in 3d performance testing. Their distribution list currently exceeds 10 million. And they are now known as Madonion.com.

The socks are great – black dress socks. With their old Futuremark old logo on the side, they do really look nice. I did actually wear them with my usually sandals. The socks came with a little tag saying that, “The creator of 3dMark are going to blow your socks off so as a precaution we sent you an extra pair”.

The actual program itself does have some improvements over older versions for example many of the tests have been changed to include new rendering images. The system that I tested it on contained:

366 MHz Celeron OC’d to 566 MHz
288 MB PC100 Ram
Trident 3d Image 4 MB AGP Video Card
12 MB Maxi 3dGamer Voodoo2 Card

Not the best video processing computer, but that really not its main use. Also, if anyone wants to send me a new card for testing purposes I would be more than glad to accept it on a temporary or permanent basis. My results are as follows:

3DMark Result 3558.23
3DMarks Synthetic CPU 3D Speed 5481.34
CPU 3DMarks Rasterizer Score 790.62
3DRasterMarks Game 1 – Race 33.50 FPS
Game 2 – First Person 37.94 FPS
Frame Buffer Triple Buffering
Fill Rate 58.92 MTexels/s
Fill Rate With Multi-Texturing 115.81 MTexels/s
2MB Texture Rendering Speed 268.38 FPS
4MB Texture Rendering Speed 4.65 FPS
8MB Texture Rendering Speed 2.33 FPS
16MB Texture Rendering Speed 1.16 FPS
32MB Texture Rendering Speed 0.58 FPS
Bump Mapping Emboss, 3-pass 84.64 FPS
Bump Mapping Emboss, 2-pass 113.80 FPS
Bump Mapping Emboss, 1-pass 0.00 FPS
Point Sample Texture Filtering Speed 102.61 %
Bilinear Texture Filtering Speed 100.00 %
Trilinear Texture Filtering Speed 64.51 %
Anisotropic Texture Filtering Speed 0.00 %
6 Pixel/individual 1284.47 KPolygons/s
6 Pixel/strips 1288.73 KPolygons/s
25 Pixel/individual 1007.21 KPolygons/s
25 Pixel/strips 1022.57 KPolygons/s
50 Pixel/individual 669.72 KPolygons/s
50 Pixel/strips 674.86 KPolygons/s
250 Pixel/individual 188.68 KPolygons/s
250 Pixel/strips 189.63 KPolygons/s
1000 Pixel/individual 53.10 KPolygons/s
1000 Pixel/strips 53.15 KPolygons/s

Two screen shots from my tests.

What else can I say? If you have the $20 for the program it is a great buy. With it you can finally tell how good your system is and compare it to millions of others. I just can’t wait to see what the girl that will be featured in the 2000 model will be called.

– Aaron