Futuremark Computers

[Alexandrin Chaples]

3DMarkincludes everything you need to benchmark your PC and mobile devices in one app. Whether you're gaming on a PC, a tablet or a smartphone, 3DMark includes benchmarks designed specifically for your hardware.

We update 3DMark regularly so that you can benchmark the latest hardware and graphics APIs. Since 2013, we've added over a dozen new benchmarks, stress tests and feature tests. When you buy 3DMark today, you benefit from more than seven years of development, updates, and enhancements. And we're just getting started.

3DMark Wild Life is a cross-platform benchmark for Windows, Android and Apple iOS. Use 3DMark Wild Life to test and compare the graphics performance of notebook computers, tablets and smartphones. Wild Life uses the Vulkan graphics API on Windows PCs and Android devices. On iOS devices, it uses Metal. You can compare benchmark scores across platforms.

Run Wild Life Extreme to benchmark the GPU performance of the latest Windows notebooks, Always Connected PCs powered by Windows 10 an 11 on Arm, Apple Mac computers powered by the M1 chip, and the next generation of smartphones and tablets. With new effects, enhanced geometry and more particles, Wild Life Extreme is over three times more demanding than the Wild Life benchmark.

3DMark Time Spy is a DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spy is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built the right way from the ground up to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers.

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is the ideal test for benchmarking the latest graphics cards.

Time Spy Extreme is a new 4K DirectX 12 benchmark test, available in 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions. You don't need a 4K monitor to run it, but you will need a GPU with at least 4 GB of dedicated memory.

With its 4K Ultra HD rendering resolution, Time Spy Extreme is an ideal benchmark test for the latest high-end graphics cards. The CPU test has been redesigned to let processors with 8 or more cores perform to their full potential.

Mesh Shaders, a new feature in DirectX 12 Ultimate, give developers more flexibility and control over the geometry pipeline. The 3DMark Mesh Shader feature test shows how game engines can improve performance by using the mesh shader pipeline to efficiently cull geometry that is not visible to the camera. An interactive mode lets you experiment with different settings and visualization tools.

PCI Express (PCIe) is a standard interface that provides high-bandwidth communication between devices in your PC. New PCIe 4.0 interfaces provide up to twice the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0. With more bandwidth, games can transfer more data, reduce loading times, and support more complex scenes. The PCI Express feature test measures the bandwidth available to your GPU.

Sampler Feedback is a feature in DirectX 12 Ultimate that helps developers optimize the handling of textures and shading. The 3DMark Sampler Feedback feature test shows how developers can use sampler feedback to improve game performance by optimizing texture space shading operations. An interactive mode lets you experiment with different settings and visualization tools.

Variable-Rate Shading (VRS) is a DirectX 12 Ultimate feature that can improve performance by reducing detail in parts of the frame where it is unlikely to be noticed. The 3DMark VRS feature test helps you compare differences in performance and image quality when using Tier 1 and Tier 2 VRS. An interactive mode lets you change VRS settings on the fly and export frames for comparison.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is an AMD graphics technology that uses highly-optimized temporal analytical techniques to improve gaming performance while maintaining high visual fidelity. The AMD FSR feature test shows you how FSR 2 affects performance and image quality. Use the frame inspector tool to make close-up comparisons between FSR and traditional rendering with TAA.

Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is an NVIDIA RTX technology that uses the power of deep learning and AI to improve game performance while maintaining visual quality. The NVIDIA DLSS feature test helps you compare performance and image quality using DLSS 3, DLSS 2 and DLSS 1. You can select between 3 image quality modes for DLSS 2 and later. DLSS 3 uses DLSS Frame Generation.

XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) is an Intel graphics technology that uses AI-enhanced upscaling to improve performance while maintaining high image fidelity. The 3DMark Intel XeSS feature test shows you how XeSS affects performance and quality. The frame inspector tool helps you compare image quality with an interactive side-by-side comparison of XeSS and native-resolution rendering.

This suite tests the ability of your video card to carry out 2D graphics operations for every day applications such as Word Processing, Web browsing and CAD drawing. This includes rendering of simple and complex vectors, Fonts and Text, Windows User Interface components, Image filters, Image Rendering, and Direct 2D.

This suite will exercise the mass storage units (hard disk, solid state drives, optical drives, etc.) connected to your computer. Involves sequential read, sequential write, random seek read+write and IOPS measurements.

PassMark has collected the baselines benchmarks of over a million computers and made them available in our network of industry recognized benchmark sites such as pcbenchmarks.net, cpubenchmark.net, videocardbenchmark.net, harddrivebenchmark.net and more.

Flexible, no nonsense licensing. Once purchased, you can move the software between computers as required.

No hardware locking.

No online activation process.

No time based expiry.

No annual fees.

Multi-user and site licenses also available.

See here for more licensing information.

Measure the read and write speed of your RAM. Parameters include data size (8 bits to 64 bits) and a selection of two test modes. Linear sequential access across various block sizes or non sequential access with a varying step size.

Standardized benchmarks with industry-wide acceptance are a must for evaluating computing systems. These benchmarks may evaluate the system as a whole, or target specific aspects. Vendors such as Futuremark and BAPCo have various offerings for both consumer and business-use PCs. However, the market for such programs in the server space is largely untapped. Futuremark has been working on Servermark for more than two years now, and they finally felt it was stable enough to let us test drive one of their recent beta versions. Servermark will have a number of sub-categories, but, our focus was on VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) - a way to determine how many virtual machines a server can support while providing an acceptable level of performance for all users.

Modern servers are very powerful and come with virtualization capabilities. This capability allows the work done by multiple physical machines to be be consolidated into a single physical server using the concept of 'virtual machines' (VMs). Virtualization brings about a host of benefits to system administrators. VMs can be used in a headless manner (for example, as a mail server or IoT controller), or as a virtual desktop with a thin client front-end. The latter can enable businesses to provide basic low-cost / low-power computers at the employee's desk. Business applications which require plenty of processing power can be processed on a virtual desktop running on the VM host / server. This aspect is the focus of Servermark VDI and our investigation today.

Prior to going into the details of Servermark VDI and its various features, let us take a look at our test machine for the evaluation. The Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T is a very popular server in the mini-tower form factor amongst home-lab enthusiasts. We already covered it in our Xeon-D review. Our unit (from last year) came with a Xeon-D 1540 (8C / 16T @ 2.00 GHz) SoC and four hot-swappable 3.5" drive bays. The following table summarizes the specifications of the Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T used in this review.

Futuremark's Servermark VDI came by default with scripts for a VMWare-based virtualization setup. However, being personally used to Hyper-V, I decided to perform the evaluation using Windows Server 2016 TP5.

The RAID-0 volume with the Crucial MX200 SSDs was used as the VM data store. A switch was setup for the VMs and they were uplinked to the main network using one of the 10GBASE-T LAN ports. For home lab setups, this is acceptable, though we must make a note here that the Xeon-D 1540 doesn't support SR-IOV and ends up increasing CPU load for this type of internal switch setup. The newer version of the SYS-5028D-TN4T comes with the Xeon-D 1541. It has better I/O virtualization support, and doesn't have this problem.

In addition to the Hyper-V role, Windows Server 2016 TP5 was also configured with a DHCP Server role on an internal network accessible to both the host OS and the guest OS. Windows 10 VMs were used as guests. Each VM was configured with two network adapters - the first one connected to one of the 10GBASE-T LAN ports of the host and the second one connected to the internal network. Both interfaces were configured as DHCP clients.

In the next section, we will talk about Futuremark Servermark VDI in detail, followed by details of how we benchmarked the Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T. At this juncture, we must stress that the Xeon-D machine is not really geared for large-scale virtualization workloads. Our purpose here is to take Futuremark's Servermark VDI for a test drive and create a comprehensive evaluation script that can be utilized for evaluating 'production' machines.

Probably everybody heard about different software used to measure performance of the hardware it is running on. I mean stuff like Windows Experience Rating, PCMark, Futuremark and so on. They are measuring different aspects of computer performance: CPU and GPU speed, memory access time, disk access time, and so on.

3a8082e126