3DMark06, the latest version of the popular graphics benchmarking software, has been released! It's a 580MB download and is likely to be in extremely high demand today, but thankfully there are nearly 30 download mirrors listed on the 3DMark06 Download page.

"Building on 3DMark05 as a foundation, Futuremark improved the core 3D engine, adding more complex ShaderModel 2.0 tests, stunning High Dynamic Range (HDR) ShaderModel 3.0 tests, and overall enhanced the product with substantially higher polygonal counts expected to be found in games two years into the future," says the official press release.


"Even with the addition of HDR/ShaderModel 3.0 tests, 3DMark06 still enables ShaderModel 2.0 compliant graphics card owners [ATI] to run most of the benchmark and get a fully comparable 3DMark score. With these demanding new DirectX 9 implementations, 3DMark06's four graphics tests measure performance of the most advanced hardware while showing visually the compelling advantages of these new shader types."

3DMark06 also features support for AGEIA's PhysX software physics library. It is unknown at this point how a system with AGEIA's Physics Processing Unit (PPU) acceleration card would perform, since it has yet to be released. We met with AGEIA at the recent CES show in Vegas, and were told to expect cards to hit the market "in the next couple of quarters". Naturally, we expect it to do more than just boost one's 3DMark score, though seemingly for some, that alone would be enough.