pouët.net

I'm developing a demo-based benchmark regimen and I'm wondering what demos to use. Ideally, I'd want 2 software rendering/2D demos to use as a CPU/RAM test, 2 older (pre-2003) hardware rendering demos and 2 modern (2003 and newer) hardware demos. Any suggestions: I'm thinking of Variform as one of the oldschool 3D demos at the moment.

for software renderung I'd go for the FAN stuff with all the realtime raytracing. true CPU killer.
modern 3d hardware rendering: 195/95 of plastic is probably a good choice.

apart from that I didn't know that variform ist an oldskool 3d demo =)

also mind to have balance inbetween DX demos and OGL demos to not let certain card peak :P

umm.. FAN actually *made* a raytracing benchmark..

http://www.realstorm.com/

Considering PC (I assume that's what you're talking about here) demos tend to really freak out at any given new driver release, making a lot of them wildly fluctuating in performance or plain unwatchable after, oh... a year or so... isn't the point of a demo-based benchmark a tad futile to begin with?

it's obvious, ppl: fr-025.the.popular.demo

Some ideas...

post 2003:
.Neusnausk in.outside.the shell (used it to choose my nb :)
.Plastic's 195/95 (also a great eyecandy)
.Protozoa by Kewlers (dunno: ran slowly on a Gf4 MX but on the actual radeon 9700...)

pre 2003:
. I Can Fly by MGDesign (2001)
. Lapsus by Mature Furk (2000)
. Propaganda by inf (2001)

SW:
. FAN's rtrt stuff

Effectively shifter is right... in theory each year a new benchmark would be required, nowadays.

My bitter opinion has everything to do with practice, not theory. In theory, driver updates shouldn't make demos go "WHOO! GLEAMING THE CUBE **THUD**"

post 2003 (in addition to 195/95 [gl] and *cough* in.out.side [d3d]): planet risk by asd [gl?], coma by cocoon [d3d?], zoom3 by and [d3d?].

Just be carefull with copyright enfrightments ;)

Variform is actually quite oldskool as a 3d accelerated demo when it comes to the technical side, since it uses NONE of the features above opengl1.1 (which are called extensions in the windows-world). Not even multitexturing ;)

But if you're really going to use 6 demos in the test, it'll be quite big in size... Nothing compared to the latest 3dmarks (which are like, 2 gigabytes or something) but still quite big.

Another SW-demo could be something from Lunix, Pornonoise for example ;)

Thanks for the ideas. At the moment, Demomark is simply a way of calculating a score using FRAPS. Nothing is automatic, it's just a way of using demos to compare systems.

I guess I can use the FAN benchmark program as the software rendering part of the benchmark, but I'm thinking that a real 2d demo (not 3d through software) could be used. Panjabmoore may be a joke, but it is 2D only and has some effects that really do involve pixel pushing...

pointless.

hellfire: just like the rest of pouet.net and/or the demoscene

lol

Another SW demo could be Digital Murder's Just a touch of funk (choosing the SW rendering option).

Wow. A demo that has both hardware and software rendering modes. That might actually be very useful for the sorts of tests I would be doing.

using fraps? would that not end up being more of a hdd speed test?