CGW's New 3D GameGauge

On Monday at CGDC in Long Beach, Computer Gaming World unveiled its 3D GameGauge. The software will help measure gaming hardware. Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operations (ZD BOp) will help refine and develop the software alongside CGW to help make it the industry standard game-based 3D graphics benchmark.

The announcement was made by CGW's technical editor Dave Salvator. On Wednesday, Salvator and CGW editor in chief Johnny Wilson will host a special panel with other CGW editors and ZD BOp experts to discuss the new software.

"Telling the 3D performance story is no easy task," Salvator says. "Synthetic benchmarks, such as Ziff-Davis' 3D Winbench(TM) 98, measure specific aspects of performance but are an abstraction of real-world applications. Games, on the other hand, are a more realistic test, though they may not measure the full range of potential features available. Used in tandem, the CGW 3D GameGauge and the Ziff-Davis 3D Winbench 98 will tell the industry's most complete 3D performance story."

3D GameGauge will help CGW readers with finding authoritative information of 3D games, graphics cards, and systems along with a listing of how to get optimal performance from these products.

Performance is gauged by giving the sum of the frame rates of a select group of games running on a specific graphics card. The games chosen for their use of Direct3D and OpenGL are: Incoming (D3D), Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (D3D), Quake and Quake II (OpenGL), F22 Air Dominance Fighter, and Forsaken (Direct3D). To compare overall system performance, graphics cards will be tested on both a low-end and a high-end system.

CGW will test and publish native API results for cards that have native API support, although this isn't a function of 3D GameGauge.

Making sure that the 3D GameGauge was done right, CGW worked with graphics-chip maker 3Dfx and asked game companies to release a more comprehensive set of performance numbers and to submit games for use in the test basket.