Several major tech companies are joining together to help promote Android as a platform for games as the open-source mobile OS has languished behind iOS in this regard for quite some time.
Acer, Intel, Qualcomm and SingTel-Optus are all joining Futuremark's "Benchmark Development Program". The joining of these companies with Futuremark should lead to the development of 3DMark for Android in the near future. There are already a couple of tools for benchmarking phones, but Futuremark and its associates might be doing a little more.
Intel's entry into this development is quite rapid for a company behind only one phone; the Orange-exclusive San Diego. It could hint that they're keen to work on more devices, or they just want 3DMark on Android.
At present Microsoft, NVIDIA, Samsung and AMD are all part of the same Benchmark Development Program, yet only one of those companies produces Android handsets. Since this is a benchmark that has existed for years on PCs, this may have influenced their decision, for they're all major computer hardware vendors.
Futuremark developed both 3DMark and PCMark in the past, and these have become common tests, so they know their benchmarking well.
3DMark should be coming to Android later this year, where it will measure your performance with graphics rendering, physics tests, and the abilities of your CPU, and it'll be relying on OpenGL ES2.0. According to Valve, OpenGL has proved faster than DirectX in their recent testing of Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux. According to Valve, OpenGL is faster than DirectX (forum discussion here).
More benchmarking options aren't always needed, but with Futuremark's history we'd expect this to be a good one, if not the dominant test for Android devices.
Source: ZDNet
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