Man, what a day. Epic Games - developers of the Unreal engine - announced today the ultimate game benchmark: UNREAL PERFORMANCE TEST 2002! The press release was issued at the Game Developers Conference taking place in San Jose, California this week. Aiming to stress-test the functionality and power of today's graphics performance, the benchmark is a barometer of how current hardware technology measures up against next generation gaming applications. The Unreal Performance Test is the first game benchmark to utilize a widely used game engine, Epic's award-winning Unreal Engine. Read more...

Remember Anandtech reporting about it? Well they already got a copy of it. I fired off an email to Mark Rein vice president at Epic Games to get some additional details on the benchmark. Here are some of the words he stated in the GDC press release: "It is well recognized throughout the industry that games drive hardware innovation. At Epic, we are striving to influence and educate the card manufacturers and consumers to improve the overall quality of the gaming experience. We created the Unreal Performance Test to be the first true indicator of how gaming hardware will respond to the ever-increasing demands of tomorrow's games." The content being used in the current version of the test shows as much as 1,000 times the detail levels seen in Epic's 1999 hit game title Unreal Tournament. Source: BusinessWire