Like it or not, benchmarking is one of the things us Android fanatics love to do to show off our devices – especially if they get incredibly high scores. Benchmarking fanatics will soon have another tool to use, though. FutureMark has developed many desktop tools for benchmarking PCs and is well-known to the computer crowd, but many of us have not heard of them. Earlier this week, FutureMark announced its new brand program dubbed 3DMark. 3DMark will be a cross-platform benchmarking tool available to both iOS and Android users, as well as PCs. The suite is available now to Windows users and allows them to test out their custom, incredibly fast gaming PCs without a problem. 3DMark offers three different tests and “maps” to PC users, but one will be available to iOS, Windows Phone, and Android users. The map, called Ice Storm, will allow us to compare our quad-core Android tablets to the puny dual-core iPad mini and finally put all of those fanboys to rest.
You can watch the video demonstration of 3DMark below.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzPQtG-E0N4
3DMark’s tools certainly look impressive. Its previous suites have allowed users to share and compare their scores with others online, almost creating a game out of benchmarking. 3DMark will allow for in-depth comparisons of devices with all different sorts of processing power. We’ll be able to see how performance is affected by large screens, small screens, TouchWiz, Sense, Snapdragon processors, Exynos processors, Apple processors, and all sorts of other things that we can’t even fathom.
Of course, 3DMark will undoubtedly bring up the classic “benchmarks don’t correlate to real-world use” arugument. Some tech experts say that benchmark results are sythetic and don’t really mean anything. Which in a way, is true. I could overclock my Galaxy S III and recive an insane score, but would I really use the device clocked at that speed? Most likely, no. Overclocking can cause serious heat and battery issues that aren’t worth the slight bump in benchmark scores. The current Android benchmarking tool used by many is Quadrant. With Quadrant, developers have found ways to make their ROMs receive very unrealistic scores, esentially taking the point out of benchmarking.
What do you think of benchmarking mobile phones? Will 3DMark be useful or just another way for developers to sell their kernel or ROM? Let us know down in the comments!