3DMark 2011 to Be Bundled with NVIDIA GTX 580 Cards from MSI

Just about everyone who's interesting in things pertaining to the hardware world is accustomed to Futuremark's already famous 3D benchmarking application, 3D Mark, used for testing any new graphics card that arrives on the market.

Furthermore, some of you may even know that the next version of this application, 3DMark 11, will be released in the near future, a refresh being actually quite welcomed, given the rate at which graphics technologies evolve nowadays.

However, it would seem that Futuremark's 3DMark 2011 won't come alone, but bundled with MSI's line of GTX 580 series NVIDIA graphics cards.

This sort of makes sense, since 3DMark 11 uses a native DirectX 11 engine designed to make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading, and the GTX 580 is, after all, the fastest DX11 graphics card currently available on the market.

The bundle will be available while stocks last in specially-designed collector’s edition packaging inspired by the Deep Sea scene in 3DMark 11.

"We are proud to partner with MSI on this unique promotion," said Oliver Baltuch, President of Futuremark Inc.

"Together MSI’s high performance graphics cards and 3DMark 11, the industry standard for DirectX 11 performance measurement, make a great package for discerning PC users," added Mr. Baltuch.

“As the world’s leading brand of motherboards and VGA cards, MSI is glad to announce this exciting bundle promotion with Futuremark.

Customer can use the latest MSI graphics cards to enjoy the stunning visual effects of DirectX 11 using 3DMark 11.

We believe new overclocking records around the world will be broken using MSI motherboards and graphics cards!” said Jason Lee, Director of Marketing at MSI.

3DMark 11 will be released in 2010, but sadly, Futuremark still doesn't want to provide us with either a date for the release or the estimate pricing.