While Futuremark launched 3DMark11 earlier this year, the update for PCMark Vantage is expected to follow too. However, the upcoming computer benchmark software will instead be named PCMark 7, and is expected to come in these few months.

To many, benchmark software always seems to be very problematic. The new version looks to provide some much needed performance update for modern computers running Windows 7, which means that Futuremark might not support Vista anymore.

The PCMark 7 press release states, “Hardware innovations like solid state drives (SSDs), and new form factors such as netbooks and tablets are greatly increasing the range of PC performance available to businesses and home users,” so we should see some new metrics addressing performance of SSDs, and other machines besides beastly fast gaming and enthusiast rigs.

System requirements list a DX9 video card as the minimum, but DX10 and DX11 are necessary for some additional tests (i.e. tests that aren’t part of the main PCMark score). There are seven test suites with 20 different workloads designed to give various views of system performance. The seven test suites are PCMark, Lightweight, Entertainment, Creativity, Productivity, Computation, and Storage. The Lightweight suite is the one truly new entrant, and Computation could be interesting if there’s any support for GPGPU type workloads; the other suites tend to correlate with one or more of the suites in Vantage (Memories, TV and Movies, Music, Communications, Productivity, and HDD—thankfully, the Gaming Suite that tended to be more of a storage benchmark is now MIA).

SOURCE via FutureMark