3DMark is the benchmark software originally made by MadOnion.com, later Futuremark, and it’s been a staple of PC gaming for over two decades. Each version pushed the limits of what 3D graphics hardware could do at the time it launched, which makes older releases — 3DMark 2001 SE, 3DMark05, 3DMark06, 3DMark11 — genuinely useful markers of where the hardware of a given era actually sat.
It grew out of Final Reality, the Remedy Entertainment benchmark from 1997 that I have real memories of running on a 3D Rage Pro, an Intel i740, and a 3dfx Voodoo 2. 3DMark is the direct successor to that lineage, and it’s still what I run on retro builds like the Dell OptiPlex 760 to get a real, comparable number rather than just a vibe.