Who Cares About 3DMARK?

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: Bar81
It's quite simple really, memory benchmarks are useless. In memory benchmarks 2T drops your score significantly but in real world usage it's practically negligible. Also, 3DMark is useless. Don't use synthetic benchmarks because as you are seeing they are worthless.

Compare 1T and 2T in the games/application you use and see that it makes no discernable difference.

No, i dont think that memory benchs are useless. I use them just to see how i compare to other systems. Its all relative, right? I truly hate this "real world" crap because in the real world your system is barely stressed most of the time, or there are obvious limitations in the software to not take advantage of the extra throughput or memory. I want to see how my rig preforms when stressed. Benching a new rig is a way to gauge whether youre in the ball park park or not. I change something that should make a discernable difference in bench X and it does the opposite--WHY?

 

[VirtualLarry]

3DMark is nothing more than a cleverly-disguised marketing tool, designed to get consumers to purchase higher-end video cards before they really need them for any real-world use. (Remember 3DMark05's debut? How it ran current-gen high-end cards into the ground, performance-wise, even though they were perfectly capable of playing the current-gen games at decent frame-rates?)

The interesting part is how 3DMark came about. Correct me if I'm wrong, but at least one (if not more) of the employees/developers at FM/MO are ex-FC demogroup members. They used to write those things for fun (and prizes) back in the day, and figured out a (clever, I admit) way to turn their demo-writing into a business, by turning the demo into a benchmark.

Plus, the individual feature performance breakdowns (texturing/fillrate/vertex bandwidth) can be useful for comparing GPUs and their architectures.

But the final 3DMark numerical score is useless for anything besides e-penis competitions.

Edit: I should add that running 3DMark in a loop is a good stress-testing/diagnostic tool too.

 

[Jeff7181]

It's simple really... some people enjoy tweaking their setup to get every last point out of it... you can say it's for bragging rights, but in my eyes it's just a friendly competition. Some people play UT2k4 to compete... some race their car... some tweak their computer. If it's not entertaining to you, don't worry about it.

 

[McArra]

I'm very sorry to say this but this forums are getting worse everyday. It seems like helpful people is leaving and fanboys and flamers are coming... Let people do whatever they want with 3Dmark, If you don't like it just don't use. Easy, isn't it??

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: McArra
I'm very sorry to say this but this forums are getting worse everyday. It seems like helpful people is leaving and fanboys and flamers are coming... Let people do whatever they want with 3Dmark, If you don't like it just don't use. Easy, isn't it??

But you miss the entire point braddah. What you just did is express your opinion, how is that any different other than your position on the issue? I flamed"competitive benchmarking" you flamed me for flaming them, it is the pot calling the kettle black.

You position is basically, live and let live, they aren't hurting anyone and having fun so leave them be. While that is usually my position, I think 3DMock does do some, particularly n00bs, harm. I agree with Larry's post above, I see some upgrade before they need to, just because their 3DM score with their present card blows, or won't run at all :thumbsdown:

Then the Whole nV optimiztion debacle really brought out how far Futuremocks' power extended in winning potential customers mindshare. A graphics company cheated so their cards would have higher scores, now why would they do that if their marketing research didn't show 3DM scores helped sell cards? I am glad it happened though, because it put the spotlight on how overrated the importance of this synthetic benchmark had become in the industry, and the enthusiast community.

I have an opinion, I have a right to express it, if that opnion offends some....well, that's just too bad

 

[McArra]

We have discussed this topic lot's of time Dapunisher, all the points given are there and that doesn't offend me. What offends me is how some people offends the people who think in another way, which I have seen in this thread in sentences like " Who cares about people who care about 3DMark?". Stupid as hell is you ask me. 3Dmark is a tool that has the ability to make some errors in our system see the light (bad driver installation being the most usefull maybe). Anyway I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about this forums in general. I have appreciated them a lot for a long time, but they are getting worse everyday with people calling "moron" the one who thinks differently and lots and lots of fanboys. I'm really confused with that, maybe time to leave for some time and return later to see if it has gotten as it used to. Call it melancholy. Nice to see you here Dapunisher

 

[Cdubneeddeal]

After thinking about it..yeah..who cares about 3dmark? Like Larry said, it's just a marketing scheme to make people think they're computer sucks by spending more and more money on computer parts. Pretty clever if you ask me. And why i'm not uninstalling 3dmark is bothering me at the moment

 

[Mykl]

I gotta admit, as a newish PC "enthusiast" I almost fell into this. See, I just built my first PC. Reading all these posts about how my 6600GT is benchmarking so far worse than say... a 6800GT, it does give me a bit of a sense in that I should upgrade.

But what's odd is that if I listen to some members of this forum, my slow memory and weak video card must mean my PC is just unbearable to use. But for some reason when I go play HL2 I can get ~60-70+ frames per second at 1280x1024 with no AA or AF. AA and AF would be nice, yes... but I can live with the extra $400 it would have taken for memory and video card upgrades.

So yeah, I'm a n00b, but reading posts like this helps to keep things in perspective for me. Honestly, other than in game playing I'm noticing almost zero difference between this new PC and my old PC (Athlon XP1800+, nF2, 1x 512mb RAM, Radeon 9000 128mb).