Futuremark Benchmarks

"Futuremark creates benchmarks that enable people to measure, understand and manage computer hardware performance. Our talented team creates the industry's most authoritative and widely used performance tests for desktop computers, notebooks, tablets, smart phones and browsers."

Since 1997 Futuremark has been pumping out a variety of benchmarks that can used to test nearly every aspect of your PC. They have kindly provided us with the software necessary to kickoff our GPU reviews!

3DMark11

While 3DMark11 isn’t the newest benchmark around it’s a classic that has been used for ages and we figured we may as well bring you the numbers! We tested on the “Extreme” preset, no other modifications were done.

While 3DMark11 isn’t the newest benchmark around it’s a classic that has been used for ages and we figured we may as well bring you the numbers! We tested on the “Extreme” preset, no other modifications were done.

For the most part the 960 fills in a nice spot between the 750 TI and the 970 SSC.  It also trades blows with the 280X which is pretty impressive as that is still a great card.  Below you can see a graph that details the GPU usage, max CPU thread usage, and the FPS during the benchmark. The drops are the loading screens between the individual benchmarks that make up 3DMark11.

Fire Strike Ultra

Getting into the more modern benchmarks from the guys at Futuremark, we have their latest one next, Fire Strike Ultra. Similar to the ever popular Fire strike and Fire Strike Extreme, Ultra turns it up to 11 and runs at 3840×2160.

Compared to the first two older benchmarks, Fire Strike is one of the best benchmarks for measuring performance numbers in a controlled manner. Because this “ultra version” runs at 4K you can see that the 960 is not really evenly spaced between the 970 and the 750TI.  Analyzing the memory usage we see that the memory is really maxed out and so we do believe that the 960 4GB version would do better on this benchmark.  Below you can see the Usage/FPS report. The drops are again transitions in the benchmark to different tests.

Fire Strike Extreme

Fire Strike Extreme is next, instead of running at 3840×2160 like Ultra, it runs at a resolution of 2560×1440.

Unlike Ultra we see the 960 pull away from the 750TI now that memory is less of an issue.  The memory logs show memory usage peaking at 2025MB – only 23MB below the amount on the card.  This means that there may be cases where the GPU is still having to swap stuff out of VRAM rather than just leaving it in cache and focussing on rendering.

If we compare the GPU usage you can see that it’s closer to 100% than it was on Ultra.

Sky Diver

Sky Diver was also introduced recently but Futuremark recommends it mostly for testing laptops and mid-range PCs hence frame rates with good GPUs will be high! Here are the numbers for your reference though.

And the Usage/FPS report:

Cloud Gate

Similar to Sky Diver, Cloud gate is meant for notebooks and home PCs.  Numbers for your reference:

Usage/FPS Report:
While we ran most of the benchmarks included in the 3DMark package, the Fire Strike series are the most accurate for testing high end GPUs. The scores represented there will provide users with the most accurate measurements. The rest of the benchmarks are for your reference only if you want to compare against your own hardware, systems, or mobile devices.

As the first benchmarks we ran, we became aware that the 2GB limit may be problematic going forwards.  Typically we don’t expect VRAM to limit synthetic benchmarks, but Fire Strike Ultra proved us wrong.

Read on for Heaven & Valley benchmarks!