Futuremark Corporation, the developer of the industrial 3DMark benchmark for testing performance of graphics cards intended for gamers, today gave a sneak peak on the next-generation benchmark for graphics cards.

“The next 3DMark will require a fully DirectX 9-compliant graphics card capable of at least PixelShader 2.0. Though 3DMark03 already introduced Direct X 9.0 shaders, and used them to a certain extent, the Next 3DMark will take the use of shaders to a totally new level,” spokesman for Futuremark said.

Futuremark’s 3DMark03 benchmark came out in early 2003 and utilized only a few Pixel Shaders 2.0 and Vertex Shaders 2.0. Additionally, NVIDIA accused the developer of making unfair benchmarks that use rendering paths allegedly far from optimal.

“The Next 3DMark will use a new 3D-engine which dynamically builds HLSL shaders. The HLSL shaders are dynamically built and runtime compiled using the most optimal compilation target for the installed hardware. Of course, all compilations produce the same rendering. This is an engine structure that future games will be using. Dynamic shader generation is an efficient way to build large 3D worlds with a wide variety of different materials. Runtime compilation, to a target selected for the installed hardware, is a generic technique to produce the most optimal shaders for all hardware,” representative for Futuremark explained.

The company did not said whether the new 3DMark will make use or will be able to measure performance of Pixel Shaders 3.0 and Vertex Shaders 3.0 supported by NVIDIA’s GeForce 6-series of graphics processors.