Futuremark and Partners
ATI and NVIDIA obviously have major roles within the 3DMark BDP but what kind of input do you receive from the smaller companies? For example, Matrox have moved away from the gaming market and so any opinions they may offer would surely not have the same relevance as those from ATI or NVIDIA?
A full list of our BDP members can be found at http://www.futuremark.com/bdp/. All our BDP members have equal say in things we do, and equal opportunity to give us ideas & suggestions how to make our products even better. We don’t downplay nor favor any particular BDP member’s input, and all suggestions are taken with the same seriousness, no matter of the size of the company.
How did the partnership you have with Microsoft for the Game Advisor software develop? For example, who approached who initially and do you have any long-term plans to continue or expand this relationship?
The cooperation with Microsoft has been excellent! We have a bunch of new things bubbling, so keep your eyes and ears open for more information later. And now, a shameless plug, go to see the third generation of the Game Advisor at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/games/gameadvisor/default.mspx
The next OS from Microsoft - Windows Vista - will offer a feature called WinSAT (Windows System Assessment Tool), which sounds remarkably like the aforementioned Game Advisor software. What level of input did Futuremark have in the development of this feature?
Unfortunately I am not able to make any comments on this one, but we will continue to work closely with Microsoft to make sure that we bring out the most accurate and easy-to-use benchmarks for the Windows platforms.
Futuremark goes Mobile
It has been a little over a year from the release of SPMark04 - Futuremark's first benchmarking tool for mobile phone & handheld solutions. How do you this year has gone for the product? Did it meet expectations of levels of interest? Has generated sufficient feedback from consumers to invest in developing a new version?
As with all new products, there is a learning curve. SPMark04 was our first mobile-phone benchmark, and we learned a lot from developing it. SPMark04’s market penetration actually exceeded our expectations since benchmarking on mobile phones might sound a bit strange when you first hear about it. We are committed to continue to develop industry standard benchmarks for mobile devices as well as PC’s, and we are soon going to announce something new. Keep your eyes open!
If another version of SPMark is planned, do have you any thoughts concerning the direction the of SymbianOS is heading towards? For example, Symbian OS is now at version 9.1, yet SPMark04 only requires v7.0 - what aspects of newer operating system would you want to target or utilize? Would you have any plans to look at expanding the OS support in any future SPMark?
We are expanding the mobile benchmarking to a much wider audience than we were able to do with SPMark04 (which is limited to SymbianOS v6.1 and up). We will always support the latest available OS at the time of product launch and also do our best to keep up with the OS development in order to keep the software up and running in the future as well. At the moment it seems that multimedia and gaming will play a bigger part in mobile phones of the future, and it is something we will concentrate on.
What specifically drew you to using Hybrid's OpenGL ES API? Given that it only currently supports OpenGL ES 1.x and Symbian OS 7.0 at best, what alternatives would you have to consider if you chose to develop a SPMark for mobile solutions that have programmable pipelines (i.e. ES 2.0)?
There seems to be a misconception about the OpenGL ES solution from Hybrid. It is not directly an API, rather an OpenGL ES software implementation. When we started to develop SPMark04, there were practically no handsets with OpenGL ES API. Hybrid on the other hand had an excellent software implementation and so we chose to license it and include it in our benchmark. This way, people could run 3D tests also on phones with no native OpenGL ES API. Note that while SPMark04 installs Hybrid’s OpenGL ES implementation during the installation, it will run with any standard compliant OpenGL ES implementation. Since then, as hardware 3D accelerated devices are starting to show up as well as OpenGL ES is getting more and more common, we have expanded our in-house development for mobile devices, and our future products will by default run on the OpenGL ES implementation which is pre-installed on the device. As with 3DMark on the PC’s, we always aim to use the latest and greatest available, still keeping the use of new features at a reasonable level. We don’t want to turn our benchmarks into tech-demos, though we also make tech-demos upon request.
Although there is a greater range of mobile phone solution than handheld gaming devices, has Futuremark ever given thought to developing a benchmark or demo for the likes of the Sony PSP, that could be downloaded from your website?
We don’t see commercial justification to develop publicly available benchmarks for consoles. The consoles are locked systems, which is one of the greatest things about consoles. No need to enable end users to benchmark those devices. However, our tailored solutions team has done customer projects to some next generation console(s) as mentioned previously. Demos on the other hand are a completely different case. We are of course interested in making tech-demos for any platforms, so let’s see what the future withholds…
This concludes the first part of our interview with Futuremark. In the second section, we shall address the next version of 3DMark to be released, with some specific questions and exclusive replies.
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