You might have missed it but 3DMark was 25 years old last week

pcgamer.com:

Last Thursday, UL Solutions celebrated the 25th birthday of 3DMark, the evergreen game graphics benchmarking tool. Since the early days of DirectX 6, there's been a version of the tool, showing off the latest graphics features and technology, and although it's not quite as ubiquitous as it was, you can't deny that two-and-a-half decades is an impressive run for a piece of software.

If you've never used 3DMark before, it's an application that runs a sequence of real-time graphics on your PC, using the recorded frame rates to give your system an overall score. The idea is that more points mean better for gaming, and you can upload your result and check against other PCs with the same hardware.

The version that started it all off, called 3DMark99 (even though it was released in 1998), actually used a form of the engine that powered Max Payne, Remedy Entertainment's first 3D game. It was superseded by 3DMark2000 in the following year, which used the new graphics API from Microsoft, DirectX 7.

This started the trend by creators MadOnion of launching a brand new 3DMark benchmark package with every new version of DirectX. Hence, 3DMark2001 used DirectX 8 to show off the power of vertex and pixel shaders, and 3DMark03 was the first DirectX 9 tool.

The next two releases, 3DMark05 and 3DMark06, were still DirectX 9-based, as that API was just being updated with new shader levels for developers to use in games. The graphics tests in 3DMark became increasingly complex, and the CPU test was updated in 3DMark05 to better reflect the kind of workloads the processor would undergo in a game.

It's fair to say that, by this point, the graphics tests in 3DMark were looking increasingly less like actual game scenes. The same rendering