One of the oldest performance measurement software packages celebrates its quarter-century. All the same.
Just yesterday, we wished a happy birthday to Microsoft Word, the famous word processor from the developer of Windows. Today, it's another software program that's celebrating its birthday... Well, not exactly today, since it was on October 26, 1998 that Finnish company MadOnion launched a rather peculiar tool, 3DMark. The software is designed to display two 3D scenes, check that they are correctly displayed and then present the user with a score. This score can then be used to compare the performance of several configurations. In a nutshell, 3DMark is one of the first 3D benchmark tools, and one of the only ones to have survived the years, as it continues to be published today, even if many things have changed.
UL Benchmarks
When 3DMark was released 25 years ago, 3D games were beginning to take over from traditional bitmap rendering. Many development studios, however, were slow to jump on the bandwagon, and even a team as renowned as Blizzard was reluctant to convert right away: its Diablo II, released in June 2020, remained faithful to traditional representation. On the other hand, there was already quite a battle going on among hardware manufacturers, and it was with this in mind that 3DMark was born: it was necessary to be able to easily evaluate the peformances of 3DFX Voodoo, ATI Rage, S3 ViRGE and other RIVA TNTs, the latter being none other than the forerunner of GeForce, the first of which - the GeForce 256 - was only released in October 1999.
In 2002, the Finns at MadOnion changed the name of their company to FutureMark, but 3DMark continued to evolve at the rate of one version per year. After that, things became more spaced out: in 2013, the current version of the software was released. Since then, it's been all about releasing new scenes to integrate ever more 3D effects: in 2013, FireStrike is launched, followed by TimeSpy in 2016 and Port Royal in 2019. Finally, Speed Way arrived in 2022. In the meantime, in 2016, FutureMark took the name of the company that had bought it in 2014, UL Benchmarks, but 3DMark hasn't finished showing us what it's made of.
