Over the past twelve and a half years, Futuremark Corporation has undoubtedly proven itself a premium provider of benchmarking solutions for high-performance and extreme performance systems, not only targeting the demands of enthusiast communities like XtremeSystems, but also serving the demands of system builders, OEMs, professionals, and the republic of gamers worldwide.

The company's most recent PC gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, has rapidly become the industry standard for real-time DirectX 10 performance competition since its original release in April 2008. Despite a few shortcomings in the methods it uses to calculate raw physics scores, the benchmark provides a more comprehensive system for measuring multi-core scaling and giving higher weights to GPU scaling for future generation architectures.

It has been more than a year and a half since Vantage was released, and several professionals in the industry have already started to make recent speculations about the company's possible next plans for a successor. Our friends at Expreview decided to send a curiosity email over to the source, Futuremark president Oliver Baltuch, in which they received a reply in less than a few hours. Unfortunately, Baltuch responded with the typical industry spiel that the company is unable to discuss unannounced products, but to be assured that Futuremark is “hard at work creating beautiful looking art and fantastic code which will be at the leading edge of technology.”

With the recent launch of AMD's latest Evergreen architecture spanning the entire Radeon HD 5800 series and the upcoming launch of Nvidia's Fermi architecture, we are lead to believe that the successor to Vantage will pitch an appealing marketing scheme by supporting two particularly emergent features in graphics rendering. Primarily, the success of Futuremark's next release will rely on comprehensive support for DirectX 11 benchmarking under Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The second feature pertaining to its success is more of a subset under the new DirectX API known as hardware tessellation.

After witnessing the release of the world’s first DirectX 11 benchmark from Uniengine last week and its feature list, we are confident that Futuremark will match its competition and will likely deliver a much more feature rich software package for AMD's and Nvidia's latest generation of GPU architectures.