Official Testing Guidelines

In order to get accurate and repeatable benchmark results, you should follow the requirements and recommendations below. These guidelines may be updated from time to time. Up-to-date guidelines are available on the 3DMark2001 SE web site.

Official Testing Requirements are:

NOTE: All benchmark tests are run with VSync disabled to eliminate the refresh rate dependencies along different test environments. However, older display card drivers might not support this feature. This means that it is up to you to observe whether VSync is disabled or not.

Additional Recommendations for Testing:

These measures help to ensure that your results are consistent.

NOTE: 3DMARK2001 SE BENCHMARK RESULTS ARE COMPARABLE WITH 3DMARK2001 RESULTS, BUT INCOMPATIBLE WITH ANY PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF 3DMARK.

The Main Window

The buttons in the lower right corner are the most important buttons in 3DMark2001 SE. They start the Benchmark run, the Demo and the Game Demo. The Benchmark button always starts the benchmark using the selected display settings and selected tests. After startup the default settings are active, which means that all of the tests are selected and the default display settings are used.

The Demo button opens a dialog, which asks if the demo should be run using the selected display settings or if a lower resolution should be used. If your system meets the minimum system requirements of 3DMark2001 SE, we recommend the lower resolution for a higher frame rate and a better experience. If your system meets the recommended system suggestions, we recommend running the demo using the default display settings or turning on Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA), if available. When you run the demo using selected settings, all of the settings in the Display Settings dialog will be used.

The Game Demo button starts the interactive game demo. It is the first game test, with the car being chased by flying hunter robots, but this time you control the car. Drive around and shoot down all flying robots using the control keys. The game demo is only available in the registered Pro version of 3DMark2001 SE.



Project Description

A file with saved results of a benchmark run is called a project. A project also contains your system info and the display settings used during the benchmark run. It is a good idea to save the project with a descriptive file name. You can also give the project a name and some more extensive comments in order to make it easier for you to remember the conditions of that particular benchmark run. The project name and comments can be edited by clicking the Edit button in the Project frame of the main window.



Select Tests

By default all of the tests are selected, but you can also choose to run only certain tests. For example the 3DMark score requires only that all the game tests are selected. Select the tests to be run by clicking the Change button in the Select Tests frame.

The Select Tests dialog has two tabs. The Normal view shows the tests in their logical groups. Uncheck a checkbox to run the next benchmark without that group of tests. The Custom view shows all the test groups and all the separate tests included in those groups. So you can for example choose to run the Environment Bump Mapping test, but skip the DOT3 Bump Mapping test.



Options

Click the Change button of the Options frame to modify benchmark, demo and game demo options. You can set the following options from the Options dialog:



Display Settings

Click the Change... button in the Display and CPU settings frame to open the Display Settings dialog. All tests in the benchmark run will use these settings. The demo and game demo also use these settings if you choose to run them with the selected settings. Alternatively you can choose to run them in 640x480 resolution to get a better frame rate.

Rendering Platform
If you have more than one active 3D accelerated graphics card installed, this is where you can select which one to use in the benchmark run. You may see two identical selections if you have a card that can support a dual-monitor setup.

Display settings and color depth
Changes to screen resolution and color depth can be done here. The resulting frame rate will be higher, when using a lower resolution, but when watching the frames carefully, you might see the pixels due to their relatively large size. In higher resolution the pixels are smaller and the frames look better. The frames also look better when using 32 bit colors. In 16 bit color mode you might see edges between the different colors especially in places with color gradients. The available resolutions and color depths are dependent on what the graphics card driver offers. The default resolution is 1024x768 with 32 bit colors.

Anti-Aliasing
Use the Antialiasing drop-down control to enable Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) and to select the FSAA quality setting. The benchmark result will be far lower, when using FSAA, especially when using higher quality FSAA. However, the graphics on the screen will look better when FSAA is used. Due to the high impact of FSAA on the performance, FSAA is disabled by default. Also, different cards might produce FSAA of different quality, and this is something we don't have a reliable way to measure.

NOTE! It is up to your graphics card drivers, which FSAA options can be selected here. Some drivers don't allow FSAA setting changes through the standard DX8 interface. In such cases you must change the FSAA settings from the display settings in the Windows Control Panel. Additionally, different cards might produce FSAA of different quality. You can compare the FSAA quality with the Image Quality tests in Resultbrowser2001 SE that is included in 3DMark2001 SE Pro.

Frame Buffer
The Frame Buffer selector chooses how many frame buffers are used. A double frame buffer means that there is one back buffer for the 3D accelerator to draw to, while the previous frame is being displayed. A triple buffer shows one frame, while there are two back buffers to draw to. The 3DMark2001 SE benchmark runs with vertical synchronization (vsync) turned off, which means that there should not be much difference in the result whether you use a double or triple frame buffer. The default is double buffer, due to the lower graphics card memory consumption. Many games use a triple buffer, because vsync is on by default and there might be time to draw more than one frame while the previous frame is being displayed. This can make the frame rate steadier, resulting in smoother looking action.

Texture Format
You can choose between 16 or 32 color bit textures and, if your card supports it, you can also use compressed textures. The advantage of texture compression in 3DMark2001 SE is that the compressed textures are four times larger than the uncompressed textures. This higher texture resolution makes the textured 3D objects look much more detailed and realistic. The reason for a lower texture resolution in uncompressed textures is that uncompressed textures in higher resolution would make the overall requirements for texture memory higher than what is currently available in many of the graphics cards in use today. This would mean that textures would be transferred between the graphics card and the system memory or possibly the hard drive in the middle of the benchmark run. This kind of texture swapping would seriously decrease the frame rate of the benchmark tests.

3DMark2001 SE uses standard DirectX Texture Compression (DXTC), which is also known as S3TC. Only formats 1 and 3 of DXTC are used, but both of these must be supported in order for 3DMark2001 SE to take advantage of DXTC. If the graphics card supports DXTC, it will be selected by default; otherwise 32 bit textures will be selected.

NOTE: 3DMark2001 SE has a new option: DXTC1 only. This setting is by default selected for graphics cards supporting DXTC1 but not DXTC3. With this setting DXTC1 is used for non-transparent textures, and 32 bit uncompressed and downscaled transparent textures.

Z-Buffer Depth
Most graphics card drivers allow you to select between 16, 24 and 32 bit Z-buffer. Some offer all of these and others only 16 and 24. A smaller Z-buffer might show some Z-artifacts (some flickering thin or smaller objects further from the camera in the 3D scene). This flickering is due to the inaccurate Z-buffer - the card cannot decide which object is closest to the camera and should be displayed in front of the others.

Rendering Pipeline
There are some options on how to render the frames. Older systems do the transformation and lighting (T&L) of the geometry using the system CPU. This is what is done when using the D3D Software T&L pipeline. Modern graphics cards can do T&L in the graphics processor, and this is called Hardware T&L (HWTL).

DX8 introduced a new rendering pipeline, the Pure Hardware T&L (PureHAL, Pure Hardware Abstraction Layer). This pipeline places higher demands on the graphics card, but is faster than the Hardware T&L (HAL) pipeline.

The best rendering pipeline supported by your system is used by default. The ranking order is the following:

  1. D3D Pure Hardware T&L
  2. D3D Hardware T&L
  3. D3D Software T&L

NOTE! Only those rendering pipelines supported by your system will be displayed. If your system should for example be able to use Hardware T&L, but the drop down selector does not offer this option, there is something wrong with your system setup, most likely with your graphics card drivers.



Display Settings and Performance

All display settings follow the same rule, when inspecting how these settings affect the system performance. All higher values produce an animation (real time) of better quality in one way or another. The downside is that settings of higher values will cause a higher consumption of graphics card memory and/or more data needs to be transferred between the memory and processor of the graphics card. Some settings cause simply more work for the graphics processor or the CPU. All higher values more or less impact the performance negatively.



Default Settings

The default settings of 3DMark2001 SE are as follows:



Benchmark results

When the benchmark run is complete, the Overall Score dialog shows your score. Below the 3DMark score is the button for accessing the Online ResultBrowser (ORB). 3DMark2001 SE gives separate scores for each of the tests, but calculates the 3DMark score from the measured average frame rates of the game tests.

The 3DMark score is calculated using the following formula:

3DMark score = (Game1LowDetail + Game2LowDetail + Game3LowDetail) * 10 + (Game1HighDetail + Game2HighDetail + Game3HighDetail + Game4) * 20

Game1LowDetail means the average frame rate of the first game test in low detail etc.

You can view the frame rates of the separate game tests and the results of the theoretical tests with the Online ResultBrowser. You can also view the result details by clicking the Show Details button, but the ORB contains many other services with valuable information about your system, which cannot be obtained off-line.

The specific tests and their result units are listed below:



System Info

System Info shows you the hardware setup of your PC in detail. Click the System Info button in the main window of 3DMark2001 SE to view your system info. System Info works the following way: Choose from the nodes in the tree structure to the left what system information you want to view. Click on the desired node to show the information or double click to expand the node. The node can be minimized again by double clicking on the expanded node. The information from the expanded nodes is displayed in the text area to the right. The text area is not editable, but you can copy the displayed text by highlighting the desired text with your left mouse button pressed and then pressing Ctrl and C simultaneously. Paste the copied text by pressing Ctrl and V simultaneously. The text can be pasted to almost any text editor or mail program supported by Windows® 98/SE, ME, 2000 and XP.

System Info shows you details regarding your PC's:

NOTE! 3DMark2001 SE runs on a wide variety of PCs, equipped with very different hardware. We have done our very best to build a system info utility which detects any hardware we have been able to test it on. Still, it is possible that your PC contains for example a motherboard, which doesn't provide the CPU bus clock speed or amount of memory in the format our system info expects. Should you find yourself in this situation, please check our FAQs for more information.



Command Line Switches

All available command line options are presented in a window, when you start 3DMark2001 SE with the switch /help. This can be done in at least two ways:

  1. Drag the 3DMark2001SE.exe file or the 3DMark2001 SE desktop shortcut to the Run dialog of your Start menu. Press the Start button on your desktop and then select Run to open the Run dialog. When the 3DMark2001 SE file or shortcut is in the text field of the Run dialog, move the cursor to the end of the text, add a space, type /help and click OK.
  2. Edit the 3DMark2001 SE shortcut on your desktop by clicking it with the right mouse button. Select properties and edit the Target: text field. Move the cursor to the end of the text, add a space, type /help and click OK. Next time you click the 3DMark2001 SE desktop shortcut the command line switches will be displayed. Remember to change the shortcut back to the way it was, so that you can run 3DMark2001 SE again.

Use the command line switches the same way you used the /help switch. The command line switches are the following:

/help - show all command line switches
/benchmark - run the benchmark
/demo - run the demo
/game - run the game demo

All of these command line switches executes the specified parts of 3DMark2001 SE immediately, without going through the main window.

You can also put the name of a 3DMark2001 SE project file after the switch. This will access the project or batch run file and initiate the settings you previously specified. Example: 3DMark2001SE.exe /benchmark mysettings.3dp

One good use of command line switches allows you to start the 3DMark2001 SE demo automatically after Windows has booted up. Make a 3DMark2001 SE shortcut with the /demo switch and the name of a file where the demo has been set to loop. Right click on the Start Button; Open the Programs File; Click on the Start-Up Folder and copy your new 3DMark2001 SE shortcut to this folder. Then every time the PC is booted-up, the 3DMark2001 SE demo starts looping automatically.



Menu Bar

The explanations of the menu bar items are as follows:

File
New Open a new benchmark project. Resets settings to default.
Open… Open a saved 3DMark project file.
Save Save 3DMark results and settings in a project file.
Save As… Save 3DMark results and settings in a specified project file.
-
(1 - 4 recent files) Open one of the 4 most recent 3DMark settings files.
-
Exit Exit 3DMark2001 SE.

Edit
Project Description… Open the Project Description dialog.
Selected Tests… Open the Selected Tests dialog.
Run Options… Open the Run Options dialog.
Settings… Open the Display Settings dialog.

Run
Benchmark Run benchmark.
Demo Run the demo.
Game Demo Run the game demo. (Only in 3DMark2001 SE Pro)
-
System Info Open system info.
ResultBrowser Run ResultBrowser2001 SE. (Only in 3DMark2001 SE Pro)
Batch Run… Start the Batch Run wizard. (Only in 3DMark2001 SE Pro)

Default
Reset All Reset all settings to default.
-
All Tests Select all tests.
Settings Set the display settings to default.
Options Set the run options to default.

Online Services
Online ResultBrowser Access the Online ResultBrowser.
Submit Saved Result Submit a saved 3DMark benchmark result.
Go To MadOnion.com Open the MadOnion.com web site.

Register
Register 3DMark2001 SE… Register the free version of 3DMark2001 SE.

Help
3DMark2001 SE Help Open the 3DMark2001 Help file.
-
About 3DMark2001 SE… Open the About box.


Other functionality

You can save your customized 3DMark2001 SE settings, so that you can retrieve those settings simply by reloading a file. Save your 3DMark settings by clicking the File menu of the main window and select the Save As... menu item. A dialog will open, allowing you to choose where you'd like to save your settings. If you change your settings and want to overwrite the settings you have just saved, just click the Save menu item of the same File menu.

The 3DMark settings you can customize include:

You can take screenshots by pressing the F12 key during any of the tests and the demos. The screenshot will be saved in the 3DMark2001 SE installation folder in .BMP format.

NOTE: Taking a screenshot affects your test result by a temporary performance drop. Therefore the result of the current test will be discarded, when you take a screenshot.