Posted on Monday, October 29 2007 @ 0:25 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Here's a look at a new benchmark called Lightmark. This benchmark focuses on real-time global illumination:
Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn't add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?
Before Lightsmark, realtime global illumination was limited to small scenes, small resolutions, small speeds, specially crafted scenes with handmade optimizations. Lightsmark breaks all limits at once, running in reasonably sized scene (220000 triangles) in high resolution (1680x1050) at excellent speed (100-400fps). Lighting is computed fully automatically in original unmodified scene from 2007 game World of Padman, not tweaked for Lightsmark and with all sorts of geometrical difficulties, with extra rooms hidden below floor etc.
You can download it
over here, it's only 29MB.
