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Futuremark announced 3DMark05 which is being touted at "the world's most demanding graphics application for PCs". We should all be familiar with 3DMark benchmarking tool, now on its fifth generation, it boosts full support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and the latest pixel and vertex shader models.

After many controversy behind synthetic benchmarks in the last year or so, Futuremark has commited to deliver a tool that will reflect real world applications performance. 3DMark05 was developed with the collaboration of 3DLabs, AMD, ATI, Dell, Gateway, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), Innovision, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, S3, and XGI.

Here's a list of mirrors for you to check out, also our friends at MG have put up a bit torrent link. Finally there are a number of sites that have posted reviews giving you something to read while you download the 290mb file.

Notice that system requirements are very high:
* DirectX 9 compatible graphics adapter with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 or later, and graphics memory of 128 MB or above
* CPU running on 2 GHz or above
* 512 MB system memory or more
* 1.5 GB of free hard disk space
* Windows 2000 or XP operating system with the latest Service Packs and updates
* DirectX 9.0c runtime installed with the latest updates