Over the years, Futuremark Corporation have scheduled the launch of their popular benchmark program, 3DMark, such that it coincides with various other key moments in 3D graphics hardware and software industry - for example, a new version of DirectX or a new generation of graphics cards.  3DMark05 was their first move at having a benchmark that fully required SM2.0 support from the graphics card and with the board market now having three SM3.0 implementations (two from NVIDIA and one from ATI), we felt it was time to have a good chat with Futuremark.

In the first part of our interview, we've concentrated on Futuremark's past, present and future - taking in their mobile benchmarking sector as well as 3DMark in general.  All of our questions were directed towards and answered by Nicklas Renqvist, one of Futuremark's longest serving members and currently their Benchmark Development Architect.  In the first part of our interview

The Futuremark Team

For those who don't know much about Futuremark, could you offer a quick resume of the team - numbers, roles, levels of experience, etc?

Our development teams have grown during the last year quite a lot, so let's see who we have here… Our graphics team consists of 6 full-time, and 1 part time artist. Then we have our mobile products team in which there are 4 guys. The biggest team is our PC products team which is packed with 9 persons. Then we have our online service team, 5 guys, who take care of all our online products such as the Microsoft WindowsXP Game Advisor, ORB etc. In addition to these teams we have the sales & marketing and administration & development teams. At the moment we have 33 employees at Futuremark (including both Finland and US). We are constantly hiring more people since the projects are getting bigger and bigger, so the number of employees changes very rapidly.

Now that Patric Ojala has moved on to Nokia, who heads the 3DMark development program?  Any other new faces in the team?  Has it grown significantly at all over the past year or so?

Patric is a great guy and we were very sad to see him leave our forces. Since his departure, we have made some changes in the organization and therefore there is no one who could be seen as a "new Patric". 3DMark's product manager is Mr. Jukka Mäkinen, who is also the senior manager for all our PC products. My role is to work with 3DMark and PCMark internally and then also to work closely with our BDP members. Like I mentioned in the question above, we are hiring more people all the time, so we have a lot of new faces running around the office nowadays.