Futuremark Releases PCMark05

(Auszug aus der Pressemitteilung)

Saratoga, California USA – June 28, 2005 – With today’s launch of

PCMark05, Futuremark furthers its leading position as the benchmark
software provider of choice for the PC industry, IT managers, IT media
and consumers. PCMark05 is a totally new product and features the most
advanced workloads, including HD video transcoding, digital music
encoding, advanced threading and trace-based hard disk performance
tests.

PCMark05 enables truly objective performance comparisons between the
latest PC platforms and architectures and supports all the latest
technologies. PCMark05 features tests with advanced threading which
enable accurate benchmarking of the latest PCs with multi-core and
hyper-threaded CPUs.

As with all Futuremark products, PCMark05 was produced in close
cooperation with Futuremark’s Benchmark Development Program (BDP).
Companies participating in PCMark BDP during PCMark05 development were:
AMD, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and NVIDIA.

PCMark05 supports the complete benchmark cycle – starting from
benchmarking a PC, viewing the resulting benchmark details, comparing
the results to those of others and finally providing means for
analyzing how to improve the PC’s performance. PCMark05 produces highly
reliable and detailed benchmarking results with a simple, intuitive
user interface. An integrated Online ResultBrowser allows instant
results comparison against more than 12 million benchmark results in
Futuremark’s ever increasing performance database.

PCMark05 features tools for both system and component level
benchmarking. System level benchmarking produces a measure of the PC’s
overall performance. It is a single number that is easily comparable to
that of other PCs. However, advanced users and professional testers may
want to further explore the performance of individual components such
as the CPU, the memory, the graphics subsystem, and the hard disk.
Component level benchmarking helps them to isolate the performance of
individual components, exposing their strengths and weaknesses.
PCMark05 even includes the ability to create custom benchmarks by
putting together tests tailored to specific needs.

Key User Benefits of PCMark05:

• Easy to Use: Easy to use for both novice users, benchmarking
  professionals, industry vendors and press labs;

• Complete Benchmarking Cycle: Benchmark a PC, view the resulting
  benchmark details, compare the results to those of others, and finally
  analyze how to improve the PC’s performance;

• System and Component Performance: Expose both overall system
  performance as well as isolate performance of individual PC components;

• Integrated Online ResultBrowser: Instantly compare results to the
  world’s largest database of performance data with global validation.

PCMark05 Test Suites:

• System Test Suite: Extensive collection of application-based tests
  that are relevant in typical home use of a PC; tasks include hard disk
  drive access, video encoding, audio compression, 2D user interface
  tasks, 2D graphics memory access, web page rendering, file decryption
  and encryption, memory access and text editing.

• CPU Test Suite: Includes tests that isolate the performance of the
  CPU; tasks include file compression and decompression, file encryption
  and decryption, audio compression and decompression and image
  decompression;

• Memory Performance Testing: Tests measure the performance of the
  memory subsystem; these tasks include reading, writing and copying
  access to data blocks in the L1 cache, L2 cache, and main memory as
  well as latency tests;

• Graphics Test Suite: Tests measure both 2D and 3D graphics
  performance of the PC. 2D tasks measure moving and transparent 2D
  dialog performance, graphics memory performance and video playback
  performance. 3D tasks exercise pixel shader, vertex shader, fill rate
  and polygon throughput capabilities for the graphics subsystem;

• Hard Disk Drive Test Suite: Uses disk activity traces from real-life
  tasks; these tests isolate the performance of the hard disk drive. Disk
  activities measured include Windows® XP startup, application loading,
  file writing, virus scanning and general disk usage.

Pricing and Availability
PCMark05 is immediately available in three versions. For private home
usage there are two versions: PCMark05 Basic, a freeware version with
limited functionality and PCMark05 Advanced ($19.95) with extended
functionality. For professional and business usage, PCMark05
Professional ($199.95) provides full functionality and additional
features enabling test automation. The software are available from
http://www.futuremark.com/products/pcmark05/.