3DMark benchmark tool creator Futuremark has announced its first full-fledged PC game, a gravity-free multiplayer first-person shooter known as Shattered Horizon. Pitting astronauts from the International Space Station against Moon miners, the game puts players in a debris-filled arena where they battle for supplies, and thus, survival. According to Futuremark, the title appeals to "everyone who has ever dreamed of going into space."

"In zero gravity the player is set free to play in new ways," explained lead designer Antti Summala. "Complete freedom of movement and unique level design create an experience that is at once familiar to anyone who loves the FPS style and yet strikingly different to any game they've played before."

Though founded by Max Payne developer Remedy Entertainment, Futuremark remained focused on benchmark tools until it formed Futuremark Game Studios early this year.

In the press release, Futuremark re-iterated its previous promise to a game that will run on modest platforms despite using the latest technology. No release date was specified.

Now available from FileShack is 3DMark Vantage, the new Vista-only benchmark tool from Futuremark.

To run Vantage, you'll need Vista with Service Pack 1 installed, a DirectX10-compliant videocard, 1 GB of system RAM and a CPU that supports SSE2 instructions (though ideally you'll want a dual-core processor).

Be sure to share your results in the comments.

Benchmark software developer Futuremark has unveiled a set of gorgeous screenshots for its upcoming DirectX 10 and Vista-only 3DMark Vantage utility.

No date has been set for the release of Vantage, but recommended system requirements are available: an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 or equivalent AMD CPU, a fully DX10/SM4.0 compliant graphics card with 512MB of RAM, and 2GB of system RAM.

Minimum specs come to a x86/x64 single core CPU with SSE2 support or Intel Pentium D 3.2GHz, a fully DX10/SM4.0 compliant graphics card with 256MB of RAM, and 1GB of system RAM.

The guys at Beyond3D have posted a new Q&A with Nicklas Renqvist of Futuremark. Questions are focused on the next 3DMark benchmarking tool.

A little happy fun lawsuit threatening for your lunch time. As many people know 3DMark comes under quite a bit of scrutiny given the popularity of the benchmark with the 03 release being dismissed by more than a few websites. HardOCP was was one of the vocal websites with their opinions and Futuremark thought threatening a lawsuit would be fun after seeing criticism of the 05 release. The first email:

I strongly advise you to not to slander our product, 3DMark, on your web site. Take down all your false and unjustified and baseless claims about 3DMark. 

HardOCP responded with a "wha?" and here was the response from Futuremark:

You know what I mean. Your articles have consistently discredited 3DMark for years now and the few justifications there have sometimes been have been without merit. It seems to us as if you have something against our product personally and are using your popular website as a platform to attack and trying to discredit on purpose and with baseless claims and sometimes also with erroneous information.

I will no longer communicate with you after this. Our attorney is looking that this situation will get resolved and will contact you if necessary.

Tero Sarkkinen
Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Futuremark Corporation

Tero however appears to have shortly later realized how incredibly silly these threats were and posted a public apology. Go ahead, lets all chuckle together!

Here is your hardware scene soap opera of the day... So it looks like Futuremark suddenly doesnt feel like NVidia is cheating on 3DMark03 after all now? Yeah.. check out the full statement on HardOCP and here's a little summary and translation:

FutureMark Statement: Futuremark now has a deeper understanding of the situation and NVIDIA's optimization strategy. In the light of this, Futuremark now states that NVIDIA's driver design is an application specific optimization and not a cheat.
NVIDIA Statement: NVIDIA works closely with developers to optimize games for GeForceFX. These optimizations (including shader optimizations) are the result of the co-development process. This is the approach NVIDIA would have preferred also for 3DMark03.
Translation VIA HardOCP: FutureMark reneges on previous statements and confirms NVIDIA was not cheating on their benchmark and NVIDIA will not take a legal action against FutureMark that would bankrupt them.

A while back many of you may recall ATI getting caught red-handed having their drivers detect Quake3 firing up and they would drop the image quality slightly to improve benchmark scores. That was just a tiny bit of a scandal. Well now Futuremark is accusing NVidia of playing naughty when it comes to their benchmark suite:

"Recently, there have been questions and some confusion regarding 3DMark 03 results obtained with certain Nvidia" products, Futuremark said in the statement. "We have now established that Nvidia's Detonator FX drivers contain certain detection mechanisms that cause an artificially high score when using 3DMark 03."

The real question being, is NVidia dropping image quality to inflate those scores? If NVidia is simply adjusting how their driver reacts to the application to improve performance without hindering the quality, then I dont see the problem. Just about all hardware vendors do this to make sure their stuff works with the most popular game engines. Also keep in mind that NVidia (among others) has been vocal in the past about the latest 3DMark not being a very good benchmark, that could play a part in Futuremark not exactly being thrilled with NVidia and perhaps trying throw some bad mojo their way. update: It seems that ATI is also being looked at and I'm just blind (Thanks Rick):

Our investigations reveal that some drivers from ATI also produce a slightly lower total score on this new build of 3DMark03. The drop in performance on the same test system with a Radeon 9800 Pro using the Catalyst 3.4 drivers is 1.9%. This performance drop is almost entirely due to 8.2% difference in the game test 4 result, which means that the test was also detected and somehow altered by the ATI drivers. We are currently investigating this further.

update: Here is some stuff NVidia is accused of doing.