3DMark Comes To iOS. Enables Benchmarks Across Platforms
Popular PC benchmarking suite and former Android convert, 3DMark, has come to iOS.
The company promises to make 3D gaming benchmarks accurate and truthful between platforms and chipsets, doing away with the notion that an app on Android can’t run the same way as one on iOS.
The benchmark comes with three tests: Ice Storm, Ice Storm Extreme, and Ice Storm Unlimited. The first delivers mid-range testing with OpenGL 2.0, perfect for older devices and aging GPUs. Extreme ups the ante, “raising the offscreen resolution to 1080p” to ensure that Android and iOS devices crunch the same polygons and make the same calculations without using screen resolution as a base.
Lastly, “3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited [uses] chip-to-chip comparisons of the hardware inside your device without vertical sync, display resolution scaling and other operating system factors affecting the result. In Unlimited mode the rendering engine uses a fixed time step between frames and renders exactly the same frames in every run on every device. The frames are rendered in 720p resolution “offscreen” while the display is updated with small frame thumbnails every 100 frames to show progress.” This is the grunt test, as it’s not frame-limited, so it can push GPUs to their maximum potential. It also serves as a good torture test for system stability.
3DMark will run on any iOS device that can run iOS 6 or above — excluding the fourth-generation iPod touch. It requires 512 MB of RAM and 174 MB of free space. 3DMark is a free download.
