3DMark arrives for iOS, allows you to benchmark across platforms
Good benchmarking apps on mobile are few and far between, especially on iOS. But that's all set to change today with the release of 3DMark from Futuremark. 3DMark is one of the world's most popular cross-platform benchmarking apps, and now that it's available on iOS, it will allow users to benchmark across smartphones and tablets running iOS, Android, Windows or Windows RT.
As noted by Futuremark in the release notes, 3DMark offers three tests:
Ice Storm is for device-to-device comparisons of mainstream mobile devices. Ice Storm is an OpenGL ES 2.0 benchmark test that uses fixed off-screen rendering at 720p, then scales the output to fit the native display resolution of your device. Ice Storm includes two graphics tests designed to stress the GPU performance of your device and a physics test to stress its CPU performance.
Ice Storm Extreme is for device-to-device comparisons of high performance mobile devices. Ice Storm Extreme raises the off-screen rendering resolution to 1080p and uses higher quality textures and post-processing effects in the graphics tests to create a more demanding load for the latest smartphones and tablets.
Ice Storm Unlimited is for chip-to-chip comparisons of the hardware inside your device without vertical sync, display resolution scaling and other operating system factors affecting the result. In Unlimited mode the rendering engine uses a fixed time step between frames and renders exactly the same frames in every run on every device. The frames are rendered in 720p resolution "offscreen" while the display is updated with small frame thumbnails every 100 frames to show progress.
3DMark will run on any iOS device that can run iOS 6 or above -- excluding the fourth-generation iPod touch. It requires 512 MB of RAM and 174 MB of free space. 3DMark is a free download.
