3DMark is a cross-platform mobile benchmark app

Back when Futuremark released their first benchmark for Windows PCs I was more interested in watching all the great effects and graphics that it shipped with than at my score. While it was nice if my computer beat the score of my friends who used to run the benchmark as well, I was not really that concerned about the artificial score and more interested in how games actually played on my PC (not that well most of the time).

Futuremark released 3D Mark yesterday, a cross-platform mobile benchmark application for Android, iOS and Windows 8 devices. You can use it to benchmark your mobile device, see how it compares to comparable devices and even against devices on different operating systems.

First thing you need to do is download and install the app. Be aware that it is rather large, with 283 Megabytes on Android so make sure you download it while you are connected to a Wi-Fi network to speed things up.

The start screen provides you with a couple of options, including running the Ice Storm or Ice Storm Extreme benchmark on your system. The latter is even more taxing than the former, so expect a lower score and lower framerates on this one.

The loading of the benchmark takes some time and the performance itself depends on the device you run it on. It ran fine on my Samsung Galaxy Note II even though I noticed some frame rate drops every now and then. A score is displayed in the end, 3219 for my device, and details about that score are shown as well. Here you see details about the graphics and physics score, as well as how many frames per second your device got each individual graphics test.

If you scroll further down on that page, you see how your device compares against other devices of its category. Here the overall score that was achieved in the benchmark and a star rating are displayed. The listing here is limited and you may want to open the larger device channel listing linked on the apps' frontpage instead.

Many devices are faster than the Note II, beating the performance score by three. At the top are the Aquos Phone Zeta, the Pantech Vega R3 and the HTC One, all with a score higher than 10,000 points and a five star rating.

Here is a video demo of the benchmark.

The benchmark may provide users who like to test new firmware versions and tweaks on their system to see if they can get the maximum fps and performance out of it. It is also great for comparing cross-platform devices but that is certainly only interesting to magazines and websites that test many mobile devices.

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