Final Thoughts

It is hard to draw any conclusions on RyderMark at this stage. It is an interesting benchmark in terms of what it can do, but it is not visually impressive and some of the effects such as the water, fire and smoke are less than impressive. The surrounding landscape, which seems to be set in Venice, is quite attractive, but the boats do not look that great and the one that explodes towards the end of the demo breaks up in a way that looks very dated, even compared to a year old title with minimum physics usage. It is also the matter of how the boats travel in the water and the very poor looking foam that looks more like a bunch of white pixels.

Now, we are not knocking the people at Candella Software, as it is not easy to program a 3D benchmark and get everything right first time around. However, the buzz around RyderMark seems to have given it more credit than might be due. We will be looking into RyderMark again, once the final version appears in about two week's time. For now, RyderMark is an interesting way of testing specific features of a graphics card, but it is not going to replace any current benchmarks but you probably will start to see more and more of it appearing in our VGA reviews.

From what you have seen so far, leave your opinion below or in our forums!