JoWooD Productions sends word they have launched the official AquaMark Website dedicated to Massive Development's upcoming DirectX 9 3D benchmark program. Word is the program will be released shortly, and in the meantime, there is a trailer for download showing off a teaser of it in action. They explain why benchmarks based on real game engines (like this one, which is based on the Krass engine from AquaNox) are more important these days than ever: "The run-time performance of modern PC games (in contrast to synthetic benchmarks) does not rely as heavily on the skills of individual developers as has previously been the case. This is due to an increasing number of games are built on top of a standard middleware layer which encapsulates different engine cores. Most games built on state-of-the-art engines share more common ground with each other than they do with any synthetic benchmarks, which are often exclusively based on dedicated codebases."