Abstract
With stunning visual effects, 3DMark (R) emerged as the leading PC benchmark for 3D gaming performance. Its tests are at the cutting edge of consumer graphics and push the limit of 3D rendering with spectacular scenes, and state of the art lighting techniques. The benchmark scores help quickly differentiate the platforms with state of the art graphic cards and processors from those with older components. In this paper, we analyze the scaling of the 3DMark (R) 05 benchmark with CPU frequency, number of CPUs, number of GPUs, and number of threads supported by the hardware. We also characterize the benchmark's workload. The results reveal that the benchmark scales well indicating that 3D games if implemented with multiple Physics and AI threads should show good scaling too on multi-CPU and multi-GPU platforms. The characterization results reveal the close dependence of 3D graphics applications on the memory subsystem's performance.