Approved Drivers

People rely on 3DMark to produce accurate results. We safeguard that trust by testing each vendor's drivers to ensure they do not unfairly influence or manipulate benchmark scores. Performance evaluations and 3DMark score comparisons can only be made when using the approved Windows drivers listed on this page.

AMD

AMD Tessellation Controls must be unmodified in order to obtain a valid score in 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Fire Strike.

Radeon HD 7000, 6000, and 5000 series:
  • Catalyst 13.4
Radeon HD 4000, 3000 and 2000 series:
  • Catalyst 13.1 Legacy
Radeon X1000, X800 and X900 series:
  • Catalyst 9.3

NVIDIA

GPU acceleration of CPU tests is not allowed. PhysX hardware acceleration must be disabled before running 3DMark Vantage.

All NVIDIA GPUs:
  • GeForce 314.22

Intel

These drivers are approved for all supported 3DMark tests with the exception of 3DMark Fire Strike.

Intel HD Graphics:
  • 9.18.10.3071
Intel GMA X3100 and above:
  • 7.15.10.1554

Lucid

    Lucid Virtu MVP HyperFormance must be disabled in order to obtain a valid score with all of our benchmarks.

    Driver approval policy

    We reserve the right to revise this document. This version is 1.1 updated April 23, 2012.

    Guidelines

    Drivers must meet the following conditions before being considered for approval testing:

    • Only a vendor's official, public and production quality driver releases will be considered.
    • The driver must be WHQL certified for all supported graphics chipsets.
    • The driver-package must be publicly available for download from the vendor's website before the approval will be published.
    • OEM specific drivers based on an approved reference driver can be approved if the fulfil the guidelines.
    • We aim to process driver approval requests within seven working days.

    Optimization Policy

    Benchmark specific driver optimizations are not allowed. Additionally, all generic driver optimizations that change the rendering quality or rendering technique requested or specified by the benchmark are prohibited:

    • The driver may not change the rendering quality level, rendering technique or replace or alter any shaders or other parts of the benchmark test.
    • Driver optimizations based on empirical data of benchmark workloads are not allowed.
    • Generic driver optimizations that do not violate the above rules and benefit applications and games in general, are acceptable only if the rendering output is mathematically consistent with that of the Microsoft DirectX reference rasterizer.

    Application detection

    With the exception of setting mandatory parameters specific to systems with multiple GPUs, such as AMD CrossFire or NVIDIA SLI, drivers may not detect the launch of the benchmark executable and alter, replace or override any parameters or parts of the test based on the detection.

    Special cases

    In special cases, such as a major product launch, we will consider approving a new driver with the following exceptions to our standard policy:

    • The driver may be pre-release and is not required to be WHQL certified.
    • The driver must be delivered to Futuremark at least seven days before the desired approval date.
    • The driver-package must be publicly available for download from the vendor's website within seven working days of the approval.

    Cancellation

    We reserve the right to cancel the approval of any driver if it is later found not to comply with the conditions defined in this, or later, versions of this policy. Such changes will be shown on the approved drivers list on this page.