All currently supported Windows versions of 3DMark are covered by this policy.
Guidelines
Drivers must meet the following conditions before being considered for approval:
- 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 they 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 UL Solutions 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.
Policy changes
We reserve the right to revise this document. This is version 1.1 updated on August 22, 2017.
