Futuremark celebrates 15thn anniversary of 3DMark

Do you remember when DirectX 6 was cutting edge for PC games? With 4K gaming around the corner, and exciting innovations like Mantle, G-Sync and SteamOS on the way, it is easy to forget how far we've come in the last fifteen years.

In 1998, Microsoft released Windows 98, Apple sold the first iMac, and the world was introduced to a new search engine called Google. It was the year we listened to the first MP3 players and watched the world's first digital terrestrial television service. And it was 1998 when Futuremark, itself barely a year old at the time, released a new benchmark called 3DMark99.

Since then we've released 11 versions of 3DMark, each one pushing hardware to the limit to demonstrate the potential of the latest graphics APIs. Today, 3DMark is the world's most popular benchmark, used by millions of gamers around the world. It's the industry standard by which gaming performance is measured.

Every version of 3DMark going back to 3DMark99 is available to download from our website. What's more, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of 3DMark we're giving away a pair of Fire Strike monster statues created by 3D printing the model used in 3DMark. See our website for details; http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/3dmark/all

This anniversary is a good time for us to review our current lineup. As a result, we are moving 3DMark03, 3DMark05 and 3DMark06 to our list of unsupported products since they no longer provide meaningful results with modern graphics hardware. As Microsoft will soon be ending support for Windows XP, we are retiring PCMark05 as well.

The last 15 years have been an incredible journey for us. This year, in particular, has been very exciting as we brought 3DMark to Android, iOS and Windows RT to make cross-platform benchmarking of mobile devices a reality.

Whether you've been using 3DMark from the start, or only more recently, I would personally like to thank you on behalf of everyone at Futuremark for supporting us. Cheers!