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The Big Whoop is that Intel has a Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool (DHCAT), which will examine the capabilities of your PC to see what functions it can perform. Can you use it to watch HDTV? Can you use it to record HDTV? Can you record HDTV while you stream TV to another PC in the home? Can you do all that while you play a game?

The DHCAT that Intel handed out on CD is at version 1.0.0 so no doubt we can expect improvements. If you fancy taking a look at it yourself then you’ll have to be patient as the download section at www.intelcapabilitiesforum.net simply says ‘Downloads coming soon’. The tool is very US-centric (we don’t have HDTV in Europe at present) and it is rather fussy about the software and hardware that you run it on, but the approach is definitely a step in the right direction.

That said, I have little faith that a tool supplied by Intel would be even-handed towards AMD. That is why we need benchmark tests that are independent of the manufacturers and which are written to test specific standards. This brings me to back to Futuremark’s 3D Mark, or more specifically 3DMark06.

Running at a default resolution of 1,280 x 1,024, the new benchmark deals very aggressively with the Shader Model 3 features of your graphics card. Specifically, it uses the full range of DirectX 9.0c features including High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting, and this is where we hit a problem. Both ATI and nVidia support SM3, HDR and FSAA. However, nVidia is unable to run HDR and FSAA simultaneously, while ATI can. This is part of ATI’s ‘Shader Model 3 Done Right’.

nVidia, no doubt, would counter that the argument is moot as the combination of HDR and FSAA will bring any graphics card to its knees and reduce the frame rate to a crawl. Of course, Valve showed us with Counter Strike: Source that HDR and [gnolossary:FSAA] can be done together using Shader Model 2. If you code well you could impress the vast majority of gamers with lighting effects that aren’t horrendously intensive. But 3DMark06 deliberately sets out to test your graphics card to the limit, which of course it should do. It is, after all, a benchmark.

Both arguments have some merit but the result is that 3DMark06 can’t run the Shader Model 3/HDR section of its tests on nVidia hardware if you enable FSAA. As a result, you can’t get a direct comparison between ATI and nVidia hardware with FSAA. Which is a shame.

Funnily enough 3DMark06 also includes a CPU test but let’s not tell Intel about that as it probably wouldn’t approve.

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