Written By : Jeff Nettleton and Trevor Haag
September 2004

You can adjust the settings of 3DMark05 to your hearts content.
There are a lot of settings that can be adjusted to fit your needs.

There are three tools to help the die-hard benchers out there.

Image Quality Tool
The image quality tool allows you to take snapshots of a certain frame compared to other snapshots take with either Microsoft reference raster or other graphics cards.

A great feature is the ability to use coloured mipmaps on any frame you capture. This is a fantastic tool for frame-accurate comparisons between cards or een between driver revisions.

Here's a capture of frame 720 from game test three that I wanted to look at the shadow rendering on. It's taken with 4xAA and 4xAF on Wayne's Connect3D X800 XT-PE. Remember the file has been compressed to a dial-up-friendly size so it's not strictly an accurate reflection of the rendering quality.

Click For A Larger Imager (156k)

Texture Filtering & Anti-Aliasing Tool
This tool can be used to test and inspect the texture filtering and anti-aliasing.
The camera can be controlled using the keyboard for better image inspection; it can be moved back and forth as well as rotated either manually or automatically.
Keyboard options also allow the user to switch between different types of textures, geometry, level of anisotropic filtering, level of anti-aliasing, LOD Bias and more.
Filters to handle Magnification and Minification artefacts can also be chosen; nearest point, linear, and anisotropic are available.
The Mipmapping approach used can also be chosen from: none, point or linear.

Graph Tool

The graph tool allows you to get statistics on the game tests with your chosen settings and show the statistics in a neat graph provided you have Microsoft Excel installed on your system.

This graph is produced using a Geforce FX 5950. Once you have the raw data in Excel it's very easy to slice and dice it as you want, aswell as changing the type of graph, the scale and so on.