FutureMarks Horrifying Report

micron

Diamond Viper 550
Veteran
Are you ready for this kids?.......In their database of over 770,000 machines, FutureMark says that the number of rigs running GeForce 2 cards exceeds the combined total of rigs running GeForce4, Geforce3, and Radeon8500 cards. Only eight percent of the machines in the database had 128MB cards. 14 of 20 of the most popular video cards were bearing the Nvidia logo.....This really makes me laugh when I think about all thats going on right now in the media...DirectX 9?.....big woop, we still arent going to see the games because publishers wont be able to push title's with pixel and vertex shaders....programers and coders are still gunna code for Nvidia based systems as usual, and my radeon 8500 will still be more then I need to play games today, and tomarrow, and who know's when....what a freakin' joke...
 
I remember the old Apple saying, Apple II forever, I guess you could say now, GF2 forever ;). My GF2 series card (MX400) has spent most of its life in its original shipping box :LOL:.
 
Well its not atall representative, since a good deal of the ppl having a GF3/GF4/R8500 had a GF2 class card prior to that and a good deal of their previous scores are still in the database ;)
 
Not surprising at all. And you have to keep in mind that those submitting 3DMark results are not the average of all PC gamers.
 
Xmas said:
Not surprising at all. And you have to keep in mind that those submitting 3DMark results are not the average of all PC gamers.
.....Yes Sam, and that only makes the current state of PC gaming look grimmer.....
 
At least the people with GF3+ cards get to experience PS/VS in some upcoming games. :)

Doom 3. *insert cough here* :LOL:
 
I just have to say, this is why I'm so ecstatic about the GeForce FX 5200 line. This basically puts DX9 within reach of any PC gamer. The FX 5600 line is also nice, and it's especially nice to have a mid-range DX9 card so soon (compared to how long after the GeForce3 launch it took nVidia to put out a DX8 mid-range card...).

The next step:
Integrated NV34! I expect to see one within 3-6 months :)
 
As far as I'm concerned, this is good news. It means those of us with top of the line cards won't have to upgrade for a while. There's more to a game than graphics, maybe Carmack and some of the other developers out there will take this as a hint to strive for some improvements in story, gameplay, etc.
 
micron said:
Are you ready for this kids?.......In their database of over 770,000 machines, FutureMark says that the number of rigs running GeForce 2 cards exceeds the combined total of rigs running GeForce4, Geforce3, and Radeon8500 cards.

What report is this, and why do you say only 770,000 machines? Futuremark is claiming 2.5 million downloads of 3dmark 03 alone, which makes it unclear what that 770,000 machine figure is referring to. You aren't referring to the PCMark database, or something like that, are you?

Could you provide a link to the report to which you refer, please? I didn't notice anything that seemed similar on the Futuremark site.
 
Not surprising really the most played game is still Counterstrike which is no problem on a Gf2, most Dx8 games can be run on a Gf2@800x600.
When Doom III comes out or some revolutionary game that you 'must have' then people will upgrade at a greater rate.
 
duncan36 said:
Not surprising really the most played game is still Counterstrike which is no problem on a Gf2, most Dx8 games can be run on a Gf2@800x600.
When Doom III comes out or some revolutionary game that you 'must have' then people will upgrade at a greater rate.

If people are still playing counter strike, I don't have much faith in them upgrading any time soon...
 
The report was featured in the march issue of Maximum PC magazine, the publication also went on to say that it will be teaming with FutureMark to build a performance analyzer on their own website maximumpc.com in the next few months, to track the system performance stats of their own readers.
 
micron said:
I just scanned the article, if anybody is interested....

Hi Micron,

By all means do put the report online if people are interested. If my memory serves that report is about 6 months old, though, and things change quite fast in this industry. We're compiling similar reports from 3DMark03 scores and should have Q1 2003 data done in a week or two. (I'll post some highlights here once it's done) While I do expect it to change we were also somewhat surprised how 'old' tech people seems to be running with. (Maybe it's the fact that as developers we typically have very high end systems, but anyway. :)

Also there's another sample report available at http://www.futuremark.com/products/dataservices/Data_Report_FREE_2002_04.pdf. This one is a _year_ old and is a compilation of the online tool users system profiles (_not_ 3DMark) so the distribution is even more geared towards the mainstream so you should not be all that shocked about it...

Cheers,

AJ
 
I have 2 or 3 graphics card, and know that when I installed 3dmark 2001. I would change cards to see what performance each individual card had. I also tried with 1 or 2 sticks of mem. and tried with and without all my other pci cards. (trying to imitate what a review site might do. :LOL: ) Anyways what Im trying to say is that the inclusion of all the gf2 might be people trying to compare what their old card got against their new and shinning card.

This might have been addressed in the article. Did they only take the highest performing card of each user or did they just sum them all up. I have not seen the article and hope someone can enligten me. :)

later,
 
I said it before and I'll say it again

The gap between the high end and mainstream has never been greater. This basically means that money being pumped into DX8 and DX9 features are leading edge dollars. Much, much more money will have to be pumped into this industry before the mainstream can satisfactorily use DX9 features.

It's because of the slumping economy, obviously. I'd rather save my $399 considering how hard it is to keep a job these days...
 
Puts all the noise about whether or not Radeon 9700 0wnZ GFFX 5800 Ultra or not into a bit of perspective, don't you think?

To the vast majority of the market, it's utterly an irrelevant and futile discussion.
 
Epic, the sceenario you just described could in fact be the case...kinda does make sense. The magazine didnt really cover that aspect....And to you AJ.....you spooked me out showing up like that...so why is the report from 6 months back?, it never mentioned that in the article...were they just sitting on these numbers, and all of a sudden decided to publish them?...or were numbers from 6 months ago all you guy's could give them?
 
micron said:
Epic, the sceenario you just described could in fact be the case...kinda does make sense. The magazine didnt really cover that aspect....And to you AJ.....you spooked me out showing up like that...so why is the report from 6 months back?, it never mentioned that in the article...were they just sitting on these numbers, and all of a sudden decided to publish them?...or were numbers from 6 months ago all you guy's could give them?

Our US PR is working with MaximumPC so I might not be quite up to date with the details. As far as I recall the data was from September 2002, which by now would be about half a year old. I don't have the magazine myself so I'll need to get in touch with the US office to be sure :(

I'll double check this with our US office once they wake up and will drop a line here. Another thing I want to verify was whether the data in MaximumPC was 3DMark users or our online service users. If it's the latter then the data is a better representation of 'mainstream' user. If it's 3DMark users then it should be more representative for 'high end' users.

I'll also make a mental note to drop the Q1 key figures here once we've compiled them in a week or two. :)

Cheers,

AJ
 
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