ShaderMark is a DirectX 9.0 pixel shader benchmark. All the vertex and pixel shader code was written in Microsoft’s High Level Shading Language.

ShaderMark provides the possibility to use different compiler targets and advanced options.

It also features a picture quality comparison based on mean square error (MSE) values.

Motivation
Currently there is no DirectX 9.0 HLSL pixel shader benchmark on the market. Futuremark's 3DMark03 (www.futuremark.com) and Massive's AquaMark 3.0 (www.aquamark.com) are bases on hand written assembler shaders or partly HLSL shaders. HLSL is the future of shader development!

The HLSL shader compiler and its different profiles have to be tested and this gap fills ShaderMark v2.1. Driver cheating is also an issue. With ShaderMark, it is easily possible to change the underlying HLSL shader code which makes it impossible to "optimize" a driver for a certain shader, instead of the whole shader pipeline. ShaderMark v2.1 is also the first pixel shader benchmark, which measures the performance of the new shader model 3.0

Picture Quality Mode
The picture quality mode allows comparison of the Microsoft reference rasterizer with the current hardware rasterizer. This works only for the default (1024x768x32 with No FSAA) settings! It will calculate an MSE for every shader. The MSE values give a rough overview of how close the hardware renderer matches the Microsoft reference rasterizer:

shader 2 mse: 0.56019783
shader 3 mse: 0.54107634
shader 4 mse: 0.52548536
shader 5 mse: 0.52206866
shader 6 mse: 0.53719330
shader 7 mse: 0.43692334
shader 8 mse: 0.71990108
shader 9 mse: 0.40015380
shader 10 mse: 1.38709068
shader 11 mse: 0.64171155
shader 12 mse: 0.60582860
shader 13 mse: 0.66471100
shader 14 mse: 0.33196863
shader 15 mse: 1.29484272
shader 16 mse: 0.89861202
shader 17 mse: 0.30872790
shader 19 mse: 0.85641289
shader 20 mse: 0.56255150
shader 21 mse: 0.56256898
shader 22 mse: 7.91011810
shader 23 mse: 8.11475976
shader 24 mse: 8.11018531
shader 25 mse: 0.53177166
shader 26 mse: 0.53177166

The smaller the values, the better. Shader 18 isn't included, because the hair animation would invalidate the results.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· compiled with the latest Intel 8.1 Compiler
· linked against the latest Microsoft HLSL Compiler
· added 1.0 of the ShaderMark v2.1 Chart Maker , which requires the .NET Framewrok v1.1