Image Quality Tests (Available only in 3DMark2000 Pro)
Image Quality Test 1 - Engineering Image Quality Image Quality Test 2 - Game Image Quality
The Image Quality tests can be run with 3DMark2000 Pro, because they need ResultBrowser2000 for comparing the images. Reference images are provided with the ResultBrowser download
You can compare the result rendered with your 3D accelerator to the reference images provided with 3DMark2000. The reference images have been rendered with Microsoft Direct3D Reference Rasterizer. If you have run the benchmark with several different 3D Accelerators, you are able to compare the images against each other in the ResultBrowser. The Reference Images can be found in your ResultBrowser2000 installation directory, under the Quality\Reference folder, such as:
Use ResultBrowser's Image Quality Viewer for comparing the Image Quality pictures.
Image Quality Test 1 - Engineering Image Quality
This image quality test consists of 7 separate tests. All 7 tests output a 256*320 .BMP file rendered with the currently selected 3D Accelerator in the selected Color Depth and Z-Buffer depth. The top 64 pixels of the image are used to store information about the rendering platform ensure image quality tests from different platforms canít be mixed to each other. The rendered test area is the bottom 256*256 area of the bitmap. All source bitmaps for the alpha blend tests are stored in 24bit format.
3DMark Quality Test 1: Sub-pixel accuracy
The lack of sub-pixel accuracy is is visible as twitching edges in slow motion or as visible seams between the polygons. This test draws a circle using thin polygons. The result should be a clean circle with easily distinguishable moire patterns.
3DMark Quality Test 2: Mip-Mapping
This test shows the difference of per-pixel mip-mapping over per-polygon mipmapping. If there is a visible seam towards the distance in the polygon and the other side of the seam is sharp but the other is blurry, the hardware canít do per-pixel mip-mapping. This is mainly a problem in games that have large floor/wall/roof polygons with continous textures. The per-polygon mip-mapping makes the triangles pop out when they reach a certain distance from the camera.
Overall, these examples show the maximum bit-depth for the textures (usually 16bit or 24/32bit). The combinations show how good the rasterizer is. All three gradient tests use a base texture with a spectrum and grayscale gradients. These images visible here in the Help files are downscaled and compressed .jpg pictures. The textures used in the benchmark are in non-lossy truecolor format.
3DMark Quality Test 3: Multiplicative Blend
Original Texture Alpha Map Result * = Image 1. Image 2. Image 3.
Image 1 and Image2 get combined with"multiplicative alpha blending". The end result is visible in Image 3.
3DMark Quality Test 4: Additive Blend
Original Texture Alpha Map Result + = Image 1. Image 2. Image 3.
Image 1 and Image2 get combined with "additive alpha blending". The result is visible in Image 3.
3DMark Quality Test 5: Alpha Blend.
Texture 1 Alpha Map Texture 2 Result = Image 1. Image 2. Image 3. Image 4.
Image 1 and Image 3 are combined with Image 2 as a transparency texture. The result is visible in Image 4.
3DMark Quality Test 6: Bilinear filtering
This test zooms into a small (3*3) pixel area in a texture. The main purpose is to show differences in 16bit and 32bit color modes. In 32bit color there should be no visible edges in the filtering. The view is also rotated 30 degrees.
3DMark Quality Test 7: Texture complexity
We are using a 512*512 texture. If the hardware isnít able to handle large textures or uses automatic texture compression, the result yields to a more blurred image.
Image Quality Test 2 - Game Image Quality
The second part of the Image Quality tests consists of two screenshots from the Game Scenes. Both of the pictures are taken with the Resolution and Color depth selected in the Display Settings. These images display the image quality in real life settings.
3DMark Quality Test 8: Game Test 1 - Helicopter
This scene shows fogging, alpha blending, dynamic lighting & multiplicative alpha blending.
3DMark Quality Test 9: Game Test 2 - Adventure
This scene shows texture + multiplicative alpha blend, texture + additive alpha blend, skinned characters and specular lighting.
Image 1. Image 2. Direct3D pipeline Optimized CPU pipeline
The optimized CPU pipelines (Intel Pentium III, AMD Athlon, AMD 3DNow!) use slightly different approximation method for specular exponent calculation than the Direct3D Software T&L and Hardware T&L pipelines. This may result in a visible brightness difference in the barrels in Game 2 - Adventure image quality test, as seen in the above pictures.