Futuremark lägger ner nuvarande ORBen och stödet för 3d01 osv

Background: ORB Needs Fixing

The ORB has served us well, yet over the past ten years it has grown to a convoluted and slow monster, with over 200 000 lines of code. There are layers upon layers of code developed through generations of fixes, hastily added features and kludges, with some of the code so old that you'd need archaeological skills to figure it all out. Adding new features and supporting new benchmarks has become more and more complicated and bugfixes harder to do. It also has the annoying habit of crashing from time to time - usually at 4AM on a Sunday morning, much to the delight of the FM admin who gets the alert to his cellphone and has to wake up and mend it.

Futuremark has noted the community feedback and we are going to take the steps needed to fully correct the issue. Step one of the fix? Nuke it from the orbit. It is the only way to be sure. Naturally this means that we need a replacement - you can't submit new benchmark results or browse the existing database of results if ORB is a crater.

"ORB: The Next Generation"

So we need some new shiny - a brand new service for submitting and storing benchmark results. Developed from the ground up to be stronger, faster, better... we can rebuild it, we have the technology. This delicate operation is nearing completion.. Here is a summary of the features of the new system.

- Faster! So much faster that you'll think we cheated with new server hardware
- Leaner! That 200 000 line monster of bloaty mess will be gone and the replacement is under 10 000 lines of code
- Much easier to maintain, extend and expand! Keeps our web coders happy (and sane)
- Works with supported existing and upcoming Futuremark benchmarks; 3DMark06, 3DMark Vantage, 3DMark 11, PCMark05 and PCMark Vantage
- Existing accounts, registration keys, email addresses and passwords will stay the same
- All results from supported benchmarks will transfer to the new system
- A Hall of Fame is included, just like now
- Will be located at 3DMark11

Retiring Online Support Of Legacy Benchmarks

With the new site, Futuremark is also officially ending online service support for legacy benchmarks. This means that the new service will not support 3DMark 2001 SE, 3DMark03, 3DMark05, PCMark 2002 or PCMark04. Nothing prevents you from running these benchmarks even after the online support is retired and you still do get a result as all legacy benchmarks display the result without submit but you will no longer be able to submit or compare scores with these benchmarks and existing results from these benchmarks will no longer be accessible.

In practice, this means that if you have benchmark data from these old benchmarks that you wish to retain, you will have, from the date of this announcement,at least four weeks in which to copy down any results submitted with these legacy benchmarks from the existing ORB. However, after this grace period, access to legacy data through Futuremark online services will be retired. Note that the legacy data won't be lost forever - just the method of accessing it. Plan is to also provide a way to retrieve your old, legacy benchmark data as a downloadable file in XML format at a later date.

As to the reasons for this move, they are fairly mundane. The usage numbers of the old benchmarks are very low and the development effort needed to continue supporting them is uneconomical. A complicated compatibility layer that would be needed to support the old benchmark data could drag down the performance and bloat up the new codebase while these older benchmarks have little practical use with today's hardware.

Wanted: Your Feedback

User feedback is always welcome. Futuremark will monitor this thread for comments, feedback and ideas and we fully intend to continue improving the online services even after this major overhaul is complete.
__________________
Jarno Kokko - Senior Editor, YouGamers