First glance at the new 3dmark!!

[Daydre@m]

OMG its Shader Model 3.0 heaven ....

Now we really need the 7800GTX 512 meg SLI to tackle this thing

[Nv40]

Originally Posted by Toss3

Wow, the snow in the pic could be real! I mean it looks so soft and , well like real snow looks like! 3dmark06 is gonna rock!! 2x7800gtx are in for a challange!

yes that Snow looks so nice there.. they are using HDR to emulate the whiteness i think.

The other screenshot have the nicest looking water and lighting reflection ever made in a game or benchmark. Looks stunning. However while the sky looks good , i think they need to lower A LOT the clouds intensity ,because there is too much illumination there.While looks cool , Doesnt look realistic.

[macatak]

Originally Posted by AthlonXP1800

Well it said all tests in 3DMark 2006 require SM3.0 hardware to run so that mean none of the tests will run on X300, X700 and X800 hardwares because of SM2.0 only.

From the interview...

I don’t want to spill all the beans about the next 3DMark yet, since the benchmark is not done, and there are some things that may still change. The minimum required shader model will be 2.0, but we will also have a couple of graphics tests requiring SM3.0 with support for FP16 textures and blending of these.

Doesn't that mean certain parts of the test will run on non-SM 3.0 cards ??