For those of who you were counting the days until May 3, 2011 and planned on benchmarking your newly built machine with Futuremark's soon-to-be-released PCMark 7 suite this week, you'll have to bide your time just a little while longer. Futuremark sent us a note this morning letting us know it's decided to delay the launch "by a few days" as it works with hardware companies to iron out an unspecified issue.

All the cool kids are running 3DMark 11 these days, but don't worry, it's still perfectly acceptable to tout your 3DMark Vantage score too, especially since there's a larger pool of scores to compare yours with. As an added bonus, Futuremark tells us they've released an update for 3DMark Vantage today that, among other things, improves display compatibility across all presets. But that's not all that's changed.

Futuremark has some good news for all you benchmarking braggarts looking for new scores to boast in your favorite forum(s). Following what turned out to be a short delay, the much anticipated 3DMark 11 has gone gold.

3DMark 11 is the latest addition to Futuremark's GPU benchmarking suite and is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware through six all new tests. There are three versions to choose from:

• 3DMark 11 Basic Edition: Free download offering an unlimited number of benchmark runs using the performance preset
• 3DMark 11 Advanced Edition: Offers all presets, custom settings, benchmark looping, unlimited online results storage, offline results management, and a few other goodies for $20.
• 3DMark 11 Professional Edition: The only edition licensed for commercial use. Includes all features, such as command automation, an image quality tool, logo-free demo looping, and priority support. This one runs $995.

New features added to 3DMark 11 include additional language support (including German, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Finnish), a native DirectX 11 engine, open source Bullet Physics library, and an improved online service.

3DMark 11

Futuremark has come up with a fun way to promote the upcoming launch of 3DMark 11, a DirectX 11 benchmark that promises to punish machines not up to the task. It's called the "3DMark 11 Guess the Score" contest, and all you contestants have to do is guess how three gaming systems will score in the new benchmark. Here are the three systems:

System 1

Intel G6950 CPU
MSI N450GTS Cyclone Power Edition
MSI H55N-E33 Motherboard
3DMark 11 Entry Preset

System 2

Intel Core i5 750 CPU
MSI N460GTX Hawk
MSI P55-GD85 Motherboard
3dMark 11 Performance Preset

System 3

Intel Core i7 980X CPU
MSI N480GTX Lightning
MSI Bigbang XPower Motherboard
3DMark 11 Extreme Preset

The obvious trend here is all that MSI branded hardware, and that's by design. MSI is sponsoring the contest, and for each system, whoever comes up with the closest guess to the actual score will win the MSI motherboard and videocard from that rig.

Easy, right? You can go here to enter.