In the spring of 1998 the German magazine PC Player put Creative Labs’ new Voodoo 2 Blaster through its tests, and one of them was a program called Final Reality. The card scored 3.68 “Realitymarks”, a little ahead of Diamond’s Monster 2 at 3.65. Final Reality came from Remedy Entertainment, the studio a group of Future Crew members had founded in 1995, and a new company had just been set up to carry the work on. As Futuremark, and for three years as MadOnion.com, it made 3DMark, whose scores in “3DMarks” became the numbers magazines and manufacturers used to rank PC graphics cards.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1997, in Espoo, Finland, out of Remedy Entertainment.
- Names: Futuremark; MadOnion.com from late 1999 to December 2002; Futuremark again until 2018, when it took its owner’s name, UL.
- Best known for: 3DMark (from 3DMark99 in 1998) and PCMark (from PCMark2002).
- Also made: Shattered Horizon (2009), a zero-gravity shooter from its games studio, which Rovio bought in 2012.
- Owner: UL, from 2014.
From Final Reality to 3DMark
Remedy premiered Final Reality at the Assembly demo party in Finland in 1997, according to Future Crew’s own history. Edge wrote in 2011 that Futuremark was “born out of Remedy in 1997 to develop the studio’s Final Reality 3D benchmarking tool”, and listed it, with Remedy and Bugbear Entertainment, among the companies “all founded by members of a famous demo group, Future Crew”. Futuremark’s own history says its founders started work on PC benchmarks in November 1997, and “On New Year’s Eve we receive our official company papers.”
Final Reality was on magazine cover discs by the summer of 1998; PC Player, in its tests, called it the benchmark of VNU Labs. The company’s first product under its own name was 3DMark99, released in October 1998, which its makers call “the world’s first benchmark for gamers”. Like a demo, it ran animated 3D scenes; unlike a demo, it turned the results into one score. Magazines used its separate tests too. Maximum PC recommended its AGP test in February 1999 to a reader who wanted to know whether his graphics card was running in AGP 2x mode: it “takes 16MB worth of 256x256 pixel textures and makes your AGP card suck it down”, and single-digit frame rates meant trouble.
The early versions shared an engine with a game. 3DMark2001 Second Edition, Computer Gaming World noted in 2002, “uses Remedy Entertainment’s MAX-FX technology”, the engine of Max Payne, and Futuremark’s history records it as the last 3DMark to do so.
MadOnion.com
In January 2000 PC Player reported that “the benchmark specialists at Futuremark”, known for 3D Mark 99 (MAX), were now called MadOnion.com, “which means something like ‘crazy onion’”. The company announced 3DMark 2000 and Video 2000, and would also distribute SYSmark 2000, made with the industry group BAPCo. What all the programs had in common, the magazine explained, was that they put their results on the internet, where users could compare their scores with other people’s machines.
The scores travelled well. A PC Zone reviewer that January reported a graphics card’s “rating of 4489 3DMarks”, and through 2001 and 2002 Computer Gaming World’s hardware pages tested PCs with “MadOnion’s 3DMark2001”. PCMark2002, a benchmark for the whole PC, followed in March 2002.
On 11 December 2002 the company changed its name back to Futuremark Corporation, to match the names of its products. Its announcement claimed “over 100 large corporate customers and 30 million end-users”.
3DMark03 and Nvidia
3DMark03 came out in February 2003. Soon afterwards, members of Futuremark’s paying beta programme, who had a developer version with a free-moving camera, noticed that parts of its scenes were drawn strangely on Nvidia hardware, and the websites ExtremeTech and Beyond3D reported similar findings. On 23 May 2003 Futuremark published an audit report. It said it had found eight mechanisms in certain Nvidia drivers that recognised 3DMark03 and replaced its rendering with less work. In a new build of the benchmark that the drivers could not recognise, a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra fell from 5,806 3DMarks to 4,679, a drop of 24.1 per cent; an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro dropped 1.9 per cent. Futuremark called the mechanisms “driver cheats”, and argued that a synthetic benchmark was harder to cheat on without being caught than a game’s built-in test.
That September Computer Gaming World’s hardware columnist wrote that Nvidia had “been in some seriously hot water lately” over its “3DMark2003 driver issues”, with accusations flying about whether it was “consciously cheating”. By then the two companies had settled their public argument. In a joint statement in June 2003, Futuremark said that it now had a deeper understanding of Nvidia’s approach and that “NVIDIA’s driver design is an application specific optimization and not a cheat”.
Later benchmarks and a games studio
The benchmarks kept coming, each built to strain the newest cards. Maximum PC in November 2004 previewed 3DMark05: three scenes, among them an airship flying through a flooded valley whose flight path the processor recalculated on every run, “as if it would intelligently steer”, although it flew the same route each time. A free version was due, and a professional one for $19.95.
In January 2008 Futuremark set up a games studio. “The benchmark team had been asking us to create games since the first 3DMark,” the chief executive, Jukka Mäkinen, told Edge in 2011. The studio self-published Shattered Horizon in 2009, an online shooter fought in zero gravity among the debris of a huge explosion on the Moon. In 2011 the whole company had 30 staff. In March 2012 Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, bought the games studio, and Mäkinen said Futuremark would concentrate on 3DMark. The studio’s former director, Jaakko Haapasalo, went on to run one of Rovio’s own studios.
UL
The American safety-testing company UL bought Futuremark in October 2014, taking on its 39 employees. By then, UL said, Futuremark received a new benchmark result “every four seconds on average”, and made benchmarks for desktop PCs, notebooks, tablets and phones. In April 2018 Futuremark took its parent’s name, and the benchmarks, 3DMark among them, have carried the UL name since. They are still developed in Finland, just outside Helsinki.
Sources
- PC Player (Germany), May 1998, p. 164: test of the Voodoo 2 Blaster and Monster 2 with “the benchmark of VNU Labs, Final Reality”, scores in Realitymarks.
- PC Player (Germany), August 1998: Final Reality v1.01 on the cover disc.
- “Finland” and the Futuremark studio profile, Edge issue 229, July 2011, pp. 166–169 and 186: Remedy, Futuremark and Bugbear founded by Future Crew members; founding year, Espoo, born out of Remedy to develop Final Reality, 30 staff, Jukka Mäkinen’s interview, the games studio from January 2008, Shattered Horizon.
- “The History of the Future Crew”, the group’s own history, republished by apollo-X Demo Resources, December 1999 (web, secondary): Remedy’s premiere of Final Reality at Assembly ’97. https://wayback.defacto2.net/apollo-x-demo-resources-1999-december-17/fc.htm
- UL Solutions, “About us” history timeline (web, secondary): start of work in November 1997, company papers on New Year’s Eve 1997, 3DMark99 in October 1998, 3DMark2001 SE as the last to use Remedy’s MAX-FX engine, PCMark2002 in March 2002, 3DMark03 in February 2003, UL’s purchase in 2014, the rename in April 2018, development near Helsinki. https://benchmarks.ul.com/about
- Reader’s question on AGP, Maximum PC, February 1999: 3DMark 99’s AGP test.
- News, PC Player (Germany), January 2000, p. 39: Futuremark renamed MadOnion.com, 3D Mark 2000, Video 2000, SYSmark 2000, online result comparison.
- Graphics card reviews, PC Zone issue 85, January 2000: “a FutureMark rating of 4489 3DMarks”.
- Hardware reviews and “Killer Rigs”, Computer Gaming World issues 208–218, November 2001 to September 2002: tests with MadOnion’s 3DMark2001; issue 215, June 2002: 3DMark2001 SE “uses Remedy Entertainment’s MAX-FX technology”.
- Max Payne preview, Edge issue 87, August 2000: Remedy’s Max-FX technology.
- MadOnion.com, “MadOnion.com Changes Company Name to Futuremark Corporation”, 11 December 2002 (web, secondary): the reason for the change, customer and user figures. https://benchmarks.ul.com/news/20433
- Futuremark Corporation, “Audit Report: Alleged NVIDIA Driver Cheating on 3DMark03”, 23 May 2003 (web, secondary copy): the beta programme, ExtremeTech and Beyond3D, eight detection mechanisms, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and Radeon 9800 Pro figures, “driver cheats”, build 330. http://www.kickassgear.com/downloads/3dmark03_audit_report.pdf
- “Killer Rigs”, Computer Gaming World issue 230, September 2003: Nvidia’s “3DMark2003 driver issues”.
- “More on Futuremark and nVidia”, Slashdot, 3 June 2003 (web, secondary): the joint statement, “an application specific optimization and not a cheat”. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/06/03/1629206/more-on-futuremark-and-nvidia
- “3DMark05” preview and interview, Maximum PC, November 2004, p. 72.
- “Rovio acquires Futuremark Games”, MCV, 27 March 2012 (web, secondary): the sale of the games studio, Mäkinen’s statement. https://mcvuk.com/development-news/rovio-acquires-futuremark-games/
- Rovio studio profile, Edge issue 255, July 2013: Jaakko Haapasalo, formerly of Futuremark’s games arm, head of Rovio’s Studio Forge.
- UL, “UL Signals Strategic Expansion into Performance Benchmarking Services with Futuremark Acquisition”, 3 November 2014 (web, secondary): the purchase, 39 employees, a result every four seconds. https://www.ul.com/news/ul-signals-strategic-expansion-performance-benchmarking-services-futuremark-acquisition