Futuremark started out as an amazing demo crew (Future Crew). The Demo scene is renowned for squeezing amazing performance out of feeble hardware... and Future Crew was no exception.

Provided they still have some of the same guys, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to make a great game *engine* (which isn't the same thing as making a great game, of course).

That their current task (benchmarking) has a different set of criteria than making a "real" game engine shouldn't count against them - especially when they've DEMOnstrated their abilities on the demo scene previously.

Does this smack of a clueless outfit committing suicide?

First you PO the review sites that promote your product, then the gaming outfits who DIDN'T view you as a threat. Now they will, and I am sure they will provide alternative tests for their product and downplay/ignore/trash results from your product.

I predict very quickly your product will cease to be relevant.

If your claim to fame is the honest evaluator of game hardware performance - throw your hard-earned neutrality out the window. Clever move.

This looks to be very representative of the notion that games today don't need to be fun or original in order to make lots of money, they just need to have pretty graphics. I hope I'm wrong, but probably not :(

Translation: Revenue from commercial benchmarking exercises are weak tea, whereas a successful gaming empire can take it up to full British strength.

Might be fun if they can have that array of B17s and fighters to battle with from 3dmark 03......or a chance to duke it out with that badass swimming monster from 05 and 06 :)

Those titles combine Futuremark's know-how in creating appealing visuals with "the highest quality game play,"
ahh yea.
i remember playing the original 3dmark
boy it was exciting at the time. no other game like it
i remember upgrading and overclocking to play it
just so i could get the highest score

it's a shame they've run the franchise into the ground though
sure the visuals are much better than the original
but it's the same old game over and over again in my eyes now
plus the difficulty curve has gone up several notches

:)

So does this mean that some future version of 3DMark may actually be relevant since it will (presumably) use an engine from an actual game? Amazing! This depends, of course, on the quality of games this studio churns out, and I don't have particularly high or low expectations for them.

Tin-foil hat on: Doesn't this mean they could conceivably use 3DMark in the future to steer hardware and DirectX features and speed-ups towards their own favorite things? In other words, by showing consumers lower performance for a test tailored to only perform well on hardware with a hypothetical new extension for DirectX or would only work well if Microsoft added support for a new hardware feature, etc.

Haven't they always been loosely related to Remedy Entertainment?

I may have cared in '03, but not now.

You know, if they'd just decided to license a 3D engine five years ago or so, they might've had an interesting proposition. They would've leveraged something they're doing anyway to get a nice little royalty stream, and 3DMark actually would've been predictive of some games.

But the big expense in game development these days is all the assets -- textures, levels, pretty much everything that isn't the engine -- so they really aren't leveraging as much as you would think.