The problem with 3dmark and any other commercial benchmarking software is that it is supposed to be impartial but in fact it CAN'T BE! You see Nvidia & AMD have both written driver's in the past (and I see no reason they won't in the future) that directly optimise the performance of their relative hardware with 3dmark.
Translation: They cheat.
Nv and AMD also optimize their drivers for real games too, I don't call that cheating, I call it making games run faster on their cards - which is sort of the point really.I ran 3dmark in the past to test system updates, just to make sure performance went up.
As I'm pretty sure performance and usability will go down if I install vista then I won't be tempted to download the new one.
I wonder how much MS paid them to make it Vista only? since we know virtually all the highest features in Crysis can be enabled on XP because they are shader effects, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you send a shader program to your video card and apply it to a surface, then it doesn't matter if you use DX9 or DX10 or OpenGL - the shader will run( providing your hardware supports it ).
Obviously MS love this Vista exclusive sh*t but in this case it's perfect because it's a benchmark that no one can compare running on XP to running on Vista!
We know the 3dmark people are big MS fans already though, that's why they only test DX performance and not OpenGL as well. I bet ATI/AMD love that too, since until very recently ATI's OpenGL drivers sucked!
Using DX means they have no interest in other OS's such as MacOS or Linux.
This comment was edited on Apr 29, 09:39.