Nice chaps from Futuremark were quick to answer on our question, why the new 3Dmark Vantage doesn’t support DirectX 10.1

Oliver Baltuch, a President of Futuremark Oj company has told Fudzilla that “As for your premise about DX10.1, we have been very clear that we would adhere to the specification that was agreed to by all the BDP Members: Noted clearly in our press release.”

He said that Ageia, AMD, Compal, Dell, Gateway, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Sapphire Technology, Velocity Micro, Vivante Corp., Qimonda had to agree that they all want DirectX 10.1 inside of the new benchmark.

Oliver continues: “As part of creating both PCMark and 3DMark we have a transparency system that allows every change requested to the specification to be seen and commented on by all the members before a change is made and AMD (ATI) participated fully in this process as did all the other members each of whom have an equal say in every decision.”

German PC games hardware colleagues got an additional official statement from Dr. Jukka Makinen, who stated “3DMark Vantage is a DirectX 10.0 benchmark, so DX10.1 features do not have an effect on the final score. DirectX 10.1 became available so late in the development process that we were not able to test and evaluate it in time for potential inclusion into this benchmark release.” You can check the rest here.

As Nvidia acquired Ageia we believe that Ageia, Nvidia and Intel have voted against DirectX 10.1 and AMD, Sapphire and likely Microsoft itself have voted for DirectX 10.1. we wouldn’t dare to predict who Compal (ODM for most of notebooks you buy), Dell, Gateway, HP, Velocity Micro Vivante and Infenion's memory giant Qimonda have voted for.

Without DirectX 10.1 inside, 3Dmark Vantage doesn’t really offer a clear picture of the future.

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3Dmark Vantage doesn’t like DirectX 10.1