Update : 

A new video has been released showing the complete benchmark run :

Good news everyone ! We have a new benchmark delivery… (Professor Farnsworth is my mentor…)

Seems like there is a new player in town on the benchmarking side, and it’s coming our way for November 2012, its like name is CATZILLA !

NB : There is also the ALLBenchmark name floating around, that will probably be the name of the benchmark suite, we will try to find out.

GRRRRRrrraaaaaawwwwwhhh !!!

(meow for a big big big angry cat.)

This is a great news for everyone that love overclocking, because this is new and looks good in the trailer, no more dragons nor cars running out from a battle or static scene, CATZILLA will be fighting… on your RIG !

CATZILLA by the polish guys at AllPlayer, Platige Image and Plastic.

CATZILLA – Dark side of the benchmark ?

Long story short, we don’t know the full story behind the name nor the concept that bring this dark-storied benchmark back to life, maybe a way of avoiding the boring part of the actual benchmarks. A complain that was formulated over the past years by the overclockers was mainly regarding the action going on… watching a PI number calculating for 5 minute or some fake wind moving fake rendered leaf, most long life active overclockers where complaining that benchmarks were getting too much static or with weird female designs.

CATZILLA seems to address theses complains resulting in a storyline with the giant cat destroying a New York City-like town until a female warrior come to kick his arse (or not – We don’t know yet) with green-light-music-saber… We will know more about the story-line once the BETA will be running in our Lab !

The project is the antithesis of productions usually associated with such ventures which are widely considered to be boring and aesthetically weak. We decided to bet on the functionality of the tool, as well as an original narrative and aesthetic of the movie. – Platige Image

So we could expect even more than just a fight !

Will CATZILLA bring apocalypse on your rig ?

From what we could read around the web (but that we haven’t got verification yet.) this benchmark should be compatible with a very wide range of systems compared to the actual most used benchmarks out there.

According to the info over at TechPowerUp this benchmark is a “cross-API benchmark designed for OpenGL 4.0 and DirectX 9 or 11” that mean we should be able to run it under Windows XP, Vista, 7 and the not-that-far-to-be-released Windows 8.

We don’t know yet about the score system, nor the validation process, but we sincerely do hope that the benchmarks will allow cross-OSes comparison on supporting calculation mode.

“I wish there could some widely defined benchmarks settings we could use in the benchmarks, like : Kitty Level : 720P/DX9, then Tiger Level : 1080P/DX11, and a Cat level : 1080P/OGL 4. Maybe a 2K resolution in one of the test would be interesting but we have to study how the benchmark react first.”  – OCTV Trouffman’s Opinion on the calculation system.

We do hope that the benchmark will be stable enough to be used on HwBot ranking too while our little finger found out that LOD tricks could influence the score… back to the 3DMark 2001 SE/2003 era ?

Parenting : Threesome seems to work after all…

Despite the bad humor joke here we digged a bit into who is behind the benchmark and what can he bring to the OC community in terms of history and new way of thinking.

First of all, CATZILLA is a polish production and come from three main “actors” : AllPlayer, Platige Image and Plastic, but who are they ?

AllPlayer (developed by ALLCinema Ltd. Partnership) is a lightweight and rich featured video player but also video converters and games. The CATZILLA benchmark seems it will be also named or be a part of a suite called ALLBenchmark as the website URL suggest.

Platige Image is a polish post-production studio working in the advertisement and film market. They mainly create computer/3D animated graphics for advertisement of games trailer like The Witcher 2 or short movies like Paths of Hate. (NB : Go and look for that short movie, regular overclockers will find some “well-known-benchmark-like” views.)

Plastic is a polish demoscene group created in 2007 that is still active today, they are also behind the upcoming DATURA game on PS3.

Theses three players are all teaming up in a joint venture to release CATZILLA :

Platige Image and the demoscene group Plastic are publishing a trailer announcing a joint venture with ALLCinema – the team behind ALLPlayer. The companies have collaborated to create a benchmark, which is a piece of software that evaluates the performance of a given computer. – Platige Image website

What is interesting here is that the demoscene is the very root of the most-use graphics benchmarks used today by overclockers. And yes, before you ask, the guys behind Futuremark also came from the demoscene (Future Crew) and they are what we know now… [Watch our In The Tech #2 with Oliver Baltuch – Futuremark for more details.]

What is interesting here is that the demoscene exist for decades now, some of them stopped, some of them continued and some created benchmarks. For more insight about the demoscene over the last two decades I recommend you to read Bent Gloom Stamnes article : State of the demoscene in numbers (1991 – 2011) on his blog. Note : Bent happen to be also the guy doing the music in the trailer under subsquaremusic nickname.

ALLBenchmark – CATZILLA is already in a closed-beta period, and should be out around November 2012.

Update December 16th :

The BETA (12) is now available to download, give it a try and let us know your feedback : http://www.allplayer.org/Download/ALLBenchmark.exe