PCMark Vantage arrives today

AS SOON AS THE MORNING sunshine hits the hills protecting Silicon Valley from the Oacific weather and that same Sun starts to wind down in Espoo, Finland, PCMark Vantage will be released to the world. [That's more than enough lyricisism, Ed.]

Today is October 18th, all the gold copies have been distributed to press worldwide and you can expect a fair share of reviews being finished as you read this lines.

Instead of choosing a boring name such as 08, the guys'n'gals at Futuremark decided to spice things up with a suffix "Vantage", which sounds drastically better than PC Mark Vista or some similar combination.

This benchmark is Vista-only, thus earning Charlie's "Me II Lemon Benchie of The Year" award, but we have to say that we understand through what hell developers have been going through. Running simulated benchmarks based on real-world apps and creating a task list is somewhat of a hell, because avoiding any particular IHV optimising its drivers/code for the benchmark may invalidate the future of the former.

PCMark went for real world tasks, such as real picture, video, game, audio and so on manipulation... this is as real as it gets

This time around, Futuremark is hiding a lot of tests behind the plain desktop with progress bar. It will take over an hour for a whole benchmark to complete, but as the systems improve, things will get better. Benchmark supports dual-core, quad-core, V8 and beyond, so this just might prove to be far better ticket to ride than SYSmark in any of its iterations. No guys, I don't want to put a clean hard drive in a system and install my own Windows if I am doing a system evaluation.

Vista has tons of different versions, and to make a unified benchmark is no easy task. Add the DRM-infection done on the code and wild behind-the-door secret updates and logs, running a benchmark is hell.

This time around, guys, turn the tables and you will be able to track down what a suspicious update to Windows did to the performance of the system, and also show what type of playback your computer capable is of.

To leave you marking the final hours of waiting, we just have to inform you that Futuremark changed licensing a bit, and now these lads will allow that a freeware version of benchmark will run on your system once. For other challenges, you have to shell out couple of dollars (USD 5.00) to get the unlimited number of runs.

The lads are trying to crack down on development of 3DMark 08 - which is now 99.9999999999....n pe rcent going to be called Vantage as well - and get that benchmark out the door tool. µ

L'INQ
PCMark Vantage website

See Also
PCMark renamed into Vantage, Vista only