PCGH Retro: The first 3DMark

... 1998:For only a couple of years PCs have been able to generate three-dimensional pictures in real-time. For measuring efficiency and speed of the many more or less 3D-capable graphics chips the synthetic benchmark program Final Reality, published in May 1997 by Remedy and VNU Labs, got established. And Final Reality is regarded as predecessor of that benchmark series which had its beginning on October 26, 1998: On this day the 3DMark 99 of the just founded company Futuremark was published. Shortly after the company renamed as Mad Onion but returned to the original name a couple of years later. There are two versions of the program: the standard version and the later introduced MAXX version with some expanded tests. Concerning technology the benchmark is based on DirectX 6 so it's primarily the graphics cards that limit the performance. Besides a DX6-capable accelerator the 3DMark 99 requires a Pentium 166 and 32 MiByte RAM. The 3DMark series is very successful and soon becomes standard for synthetic Direct3D benchmarks for gaming PCs.