Monday, April 28, 2008

3DMark Vantage


Well Futuremark are the kings of graphics benchmarking, in 2006 they just gave us a graphic refresh of 2005's tests and hopes were high that "Vantage" would look great.

I spent about 2 hours waiting for the trial key to arrive and it never did, curiosity got the better of me and I lashed out the $9 US dollars or so for the basic edition, amazingly I got an email with the key 1 second later.

The first game test looks awful apart from one nice cloth effect; Futuremark cannot animate people whatsoever. The second test is set in space and looks great, think Homeworld 3 in 2010. Overall though, I'm very disappointed with this 3DMARK. There is no demo mode which was always my favourite feature and the graphics are not exactly a revolutionary jump, in fact they are miles behind modern games like Mass Effect and Crysis. What's the point of having loads of parallax occlusion mapping, ray tracing and volumetric fog etc if you can't make it look good?

So onto the results

3DMark Score P6131
CPU Score 10771
Graphics Score 5361

Q6600 @ 3000mhz
4 gigs ram
8800gtx @ 650 / 1000mhz

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Mafia 2


Well to say this sequel is highly anticipated is a major understatment; many peoples favourite game of all time, certainly one of my top favourites ever. Check out the new superb screenshots!

New screenshots