FM_Jarnis Posted March 14, 2011 Share Posted March 14, 2011 3DMark Vantage version 1.1.0 - Trial Edition discontinued - Basic Edition now free, was previously $6.95 - Added display scaling to all presets: benchmark now scales the output to best fit the display - GPU physics acceleration is now disabled by default during the CPU tests - Systeminfo component updated to version 4.0 Mirrors are getting files online over the next few hours. Official pages won't update until tomorrow, so consider this as an early heads-up. There will also be a discount for existing Basic Edition owners to upgrade to Advanced for $5. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christian Ney Posted March 14, 2011 Share Posted March 14, 2011 For those who have got the 1rst post bug: 3DMark Vantage version 1.1.0 - Trial Edition discontinued - Basic Edition now free, was previously $6.95 - Added display scaling to all presets: benchmark now scales the output to best fit the display - GPU physics acceleration is now disabled by default during the CPU tests - Systeminfo component updated to version 4.0 Mirrors are getting files online over the next few hours. Official pages won't update until tomorrow, so consider this as an early heads-up. There will also be a discount for existing Basic Edition owners to upgrade to Advanced for $5. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monstru Posted March 14, 2011 Share Posted March 14, 2011 Praise the lord!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christian Ney Posted March 14, 2011 Share Posted March 14, 2011 Praise the lord!!! thx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thebanik Posted March 15, 2011 Share Posted March 15, 2011 3DMark Vantage version 1.1.0 - Trial Edition discontinued - Basic Edition now free, was previously $6.95 - Added display scaling to all presets: benchmark now scales the output to best fit the display - GPU physics acceleration is now disabled by default during the CPU tests - Systeminfo component updated to version 4.0 Mirrors are getting files online over the next few hours. Official pages won't update until tomorrow, so consider this as an early heads-up. There will also be a discount for existing Basic Edition owners to upgrade to Advanced for $5. Scores from before patch and after patch comparable(ofcourse if Physx was disabled)??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted March 16, 2011 Author Share Posted March 16, 2011 Scores from before patch and after patch comparable(ofcourse if Physx was disabled)??? Yes. There may be some very small variance due to the fact that the new build is recompiled with newer complier and libraries, but it was deemed to be within margin of error and there was no reason to invalidate the vast amount of existing scores. The difference should be around 1-2%. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eldonko Posted August 4, 2011 Share Posted August 4, 2011 Does this work with W7 yet? Last time I installed 1.10 I just got crash after crash and had to revert to 1.02 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxi Posted August 4, 2011 Share Posted August 4, 2011 Nice to see a free edition available again Is there a changelog for the system info component? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted September 16, 2011 Author Share Posted September 16, 2011 SystemInfo changelog (and latest standalone update) is always here: http://www.3dmark.com/support/systeminfo-updates/ (4.2 just went live, we'll post the changelog for it later today) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted September 16, 2011 Author Share Posted September 16, 2011 Does this work with W7 yet? Last time I installed 1.10 I just got crash after crash and had to revert to 1.02 AFAIK that was caused by SystemInfo 4.0 which had some issues. 4.2 should fix those. http://www.3dmark.com/support/systeminfo-updates/ Download latest Vantage, install SI 4.2 update and it should work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 That's the patch that will allow AMD VGAs to be used in the HOF and competitions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hondacity Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 thanks mr jarnis @ FM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 IMPORTANT Straight from FM: FYI, the new version of the System Info (4.2) implements the detection for this setting (AMD's tesselation level). Automated online checking for this is scheduled for next week and it will work in our service in practice much like the GPU PhysX check in 3DMark Vantage, so results with Tesselation levels adjusted will be accepted and can be stored on user accounts, but a note of this is shown with the result and they will not be valid for our Hall of Fame or contests for highest scores. Practically, that means more problems for us. With 3DMark Vantage's Physics, we could easily see if it was enabled or not by comparing the CPU scores. With the Tesselation level, this is much more difficult since there is scaling possible. Unless FM will show what level is used in the submission page, we won't be able to be 100% sure. This also means that for official FM HOF results, you can now use AMD graphics as long as you don't finetune the tesselation level. It's now also possible to use the cards for competitions at Futuremark (which previously wasn't possible due to non-FM approved Catalyst drivers). Let's look into this more closely. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K404 Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 Has system Info 4.2 been included in the main Vantage download? Or... to re-phrase... if we download Vantage today, do we get the latest build with the latest system info already included? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted September 16, 2011 Author Share Posted September 16, 2011 Has system Info 4.2 been included in the main Vantage download? Or... to re-phrase... if we download Vantage today, do we get the latest build with the latest system info already included? Not yet. It is a much larger operation to (re)build benchmark installers, including the relevant QA. We will eventually release repackaged installers of all supported benchmarks but it is most likely that those will wait until a few fixes are ready & tested for the benchmarks themselves. Probable timeframe 1-3 months. Until then, you have to download the installer and then separately install the latest SI. Or the other way around. The older SI that is in the benchmark installer won't overwrite 4.2 if you already have it installed. Another way to install SI 4.2 is to just run Game-o-Meter once - it will update SystemInfo to 4.2 if it is not present or up-to-date. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K404 Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 Ok, thanks for the info Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted September 16, 2011 Author Share Posted September 16, 2011 (edited) IMPORTANT Straight from FM: Practically, that means more problems for us. With 3DMark Vantage's Physics, we could easily see if it was enabled or not by comparing the CPU scores. With the Tesselation level, this is much more difficult since there is scaling possible. Unless FM will show what level is used in the submission page, we won't be able to be 100% sure. This also means that for official FM HOF results, you can now use AMD graphics as long as you don't finetune the tesselation level. It's now also possible to use the cards for competitions at Futuremark (which previously wasn't possible due to non-FM approved Catalyst drivers). Let's look into this more closely. Confirming this. SystemInfo 4.2 can tell if you are "cheating" with tessellation controls in 3DMark 11. We are still working on the 3dmark.com result page side of this - it may be possible to include the details on the settings used on the result page (SystemInfo 4.2 reads and saves the settings that AMD drivers use and they are included in submits as of, well, now). Feedback on that is more than welcome as to what exactly you would want the result page to show. All that is certain at this point is that it will show that the result is not valid (similar to GPU PhysX + Vantage) if tessellation loads have been reduced with driver settings. I don't have a date yet for when 3dmark.com results page will be updated and when AMD driver approval is completed but it is coming soon ("a few weeks" is a good educated guess). At the moment we are at the stage where we are collecting data and testing the backend code so we can reliably say which results conform to the driver approval policy and which don't. Sorry that this has taken us so long to implement but it was a fairly large addition to SystemInfo capabilities and it kinda dropped on top of all other scheduled work (annoying the makers of those schedules and plans greatly). The wheels of software development sometimes turn slowly, but they do turn... To emphasise: You cannot (yet) get to HoF / get approved driver results with AMD drivers later than 11.1 or thereabouts, but any results that you submit after installing 4.2 SystemInfo with the current AMD drivers should turn into valid, approved results when the work related to this is complete and pushed live (assumption: you do not touch the tessellation controls) Edited September 16, 2011 by FM_Jarnis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 Okay, sounds good. For the community, there's one important issue though: we won't see the tessellation level (or if it's ran default) from the application GUI. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El Gappo Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 Well... tessellation is low ( AMD optimized ) by default so what exactly is legit? Are hwbot going along with this and removing all old dx11 amd records? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 That's what's being discussed here: http://hwbot.org/forum/showthread.php?t=17844 Tbh, since we can't spot the difference in the benchmark GUI, I'm not too eager to do anything. Actually, we should just figure out how the disable Tesselation on Nvidia cards and the playing field is even again Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxi Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 Interesting that FM decided to care about this when they didn't bother with LOD, seems a little biased to me. Perhaps Oliver Baltuch's history with Nvidia has something to do with it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted September 17, 2011 Share Posted September 17, 2011 Oh, interesting. Did not know about OB's connection with Nvidia! I don't think there's faul play here, though. If FM was biased like that, they would never have disallowed GPU physics. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted September 19, 2011 Author Share Posted September 19, 2011 (edited) Well... tessellation is low ( AMD optimized ) by default so what exactly is legit? Are hwbot going along with this and removing all old dx11 amd records? AMD Optimized, according to our tests, does application detection before changing anything. With 3DMark 11, "AMD Optimized" does not change the score or the workload in any way. AMD Optimized reduces tessellation only in specific games AMD thinks are "unfair" (and Green Team sponsored), and does it in ways that AMD thinks doesn't reduce image quality, just improve performance. If this mode would detect 3DMark 11 and reduce tessellation, it would immediately run afoul of the driver approval policy which says that drivers cannot specifically detect 3dmark executable and change anything based on that (with the exception of SLI/Crossfire mode selection ONLY) and AMD drivers would all be binned as "no good" until they'd change it. But the situation is that, as run with default settings, AMD drivers produce fine scores. The only issue is that until SI 4.2, we could not tell if those driver settings were used to alter the workload or not, so the only solution was to reject all drivers until this could be detected. The goal here is to ensure that the benchmark runs exact same workload on Green and Other Green team hardware. LOD tweaking is different in that, as I understand it, it is possible on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. However, once this is in place, I guess adding a check for that too would not be too complex (would you want it to be there?) Edited September 19, 2011 by FM_Jarnis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted September 19, 2011 Author Share Posted September 19, 2011 That's what's being discussed here: http://hwbot.org/forum/showthread.php?t=17844 Tbh, since we can't spot the difference in the benchmark GUI, I'm not too eager to do anything. Actually, we should just figure out how the disable Tesselation on Nvidia cards and the playing field is even again If this is something that you would want, it can be considered as something that could be added in the next patch for 3DMark 11. We are planning on releasing another patch for 3DMark 11 this year (since we have to bundle 4.2 SI with the benchmark, might as well do some other fixes). So whatever SI reads from AMD settings could possibly be displayed in the benchmark UI. Would this be useful? (In our view, the online service page is the "real" result, validated - whatever is shown on the benchmark UI could be fake/photoshop/whatever anyway, so it isn't something we thought would be a big deal) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
|ron Posted September 19, 2011 Share Posted September 19, 2011 Ok, so no tessellation, no lods. What is overclocking a vga about, then? Pure frequency? Oh, interesting, so the skills will be the amount of binning needed to find the right vga, the right cpu etc... I strongly disagree. I can understand the decision behind prohibiting the mipmap tweaking: it was not a "tweak" it was a blank screen from the beginning to the end of the bench. But the lods... don't change the rules even on that please -.- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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