After a two-year hiatus, Futuremark is back with a new version of 3DMark, and in many ways this is their most ambitious version to date. Instead of the usual PC graphics benchmark, with this release, dubbed simply “3DMark”, Futuremark is creating a cross-platform benchmark—Windows, Windows RT, iOS, and Android will all be capable of running the same graphics benchmark, sort of. Today’s release is for Windows only, and this is the most feature-packed of the 3DMark versions with three separate graphics benchmarks.

With the 1.00 release now available and a press copy of 3DMark Professional, we decided to take a different approach from most other review sites: we’re going to focus on performance testing with laptops. We don’t normally run 3DMark for our CPU and GPU reviews, but for laptops it can be a useful addition. The reason is simple: we don’t usually have long-term access to these systems, so in six months or a year when we update benchmarks we don’t have the option to go back and retest a bunch of hardware to provide current results. With that in mind, we grabbed some of the recently reviewed and not-yet-reviewed laptops to run some preliminary benchmarks with the latest 3DMark. Here are our thoughts on Futuremark’s latest, which adds some useful new features to the mix.

We just sat down for NVIDIA's Pre-CES press event. Things are running a bit late now, but we expect the event to start in the next 15 minutes. Keep yourself here for the live blog!