14 DAY TRIAL // PCs nowadays can do a lot of things, and it is benchmarks that users employ in their effort to learn just how well their own configurations run, like PCMark 7, which Futuremark just announced.
No doubt consumers have seen and heard of many of the past year's most promising developments, including but not limited to new CPUs, faster memory, more capacious and speedy storage, faster graphics with DirectX 11 and many more.
All in all, the level of performance achievable by a personal computer went higher by quite a bit over a fairly short period of time.
Also, with so many parts of computers gaining a higher performance limit than ever, it might be getting hard to establish just how strong a PC is and how well it runs various applications.
To this end, there have always been those very useful programs known as benchmarks, which test either the ability of one sort of resource or of more/all of them.
3DMark, for instance, focuses most on the graphics cards, but it is PCMark that analyzes the entire system.
That said, Futuremark just officially introduced the newest version of the latter, PCMark 7, covering computation, storage, web browsing, gaming and image and video manipulation.
"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," said Jani Joki, Director of PC Products and Services at Futuremark.
"With so much choice available, PCMark 7 is an essential and easy to use tool to test and compare PC performance accurately and reliably across a wide range of usage scenarios."
No official release date was provided, though Futuremark did, at least, say that PCMark 7 was coming soon. Once it does show up, the pricing details should be revealed as well.