This article left a sour taste in my mouth. The article started out biased by immediately discrediting Futuremark and making repeated negative references to the supposedly unchanged rendering engine since 3DMark05.
Noticing some of the comments and the tone of the article, I can't help but get the feeling that nobody sees a point in this application. While it is true that the scores don't always translate easily into what you can expect to see performance wise in a game, they are valid indicators of the raw power of your system.
This application does not apply to everyone. Much like a person working as an attorney would have little use with AutoCAD, so is it true that many people could care less for the latest Futuremark benchmark release. However, if you care just as much about your rigs ability to handle a game at the most grueling of settings, 3DMark is a tool to test your rigs capability and compare it to others around the world.
Vantage is the only benchmarking program for DirectX10 that I know and the rendering engine has had features added to accomodate. Thus, stating the rendering engine is unchanged is making an ignorant assumption that just because the graphics look cartooney, nothing really has changed. Many changes have been introduced with the latest implementation of DirectX.
As far as the 20 dollars is concerned: they are not supposed to be compensated for their time and effort? If you want a tool whose benchmarking results you'll never be able to compare with others and whose rendering capabilities were meant for DirectX 8, then by all means save your money and go download some freeware junk. You always get what you pay for.
20 dollars is not much for a PC enthusiast who has been waiting for the benchmarking tool of choice to finally give a score based on DirectX 10. I personally purchased the Basic edition. I want to do more than just the trial run, although I must say I am a tad bit disappointed at the features in the basic edition. Other than being able to do multiple test runs, it is like the free versions were in previous releases with nothing customizable at all.
A few tweakable settings would be nice, considering you were a paying customer. Also, version 1.0 of this program is stable, but buggy nonetheless. People are willing to spend hundreds on the latest processor and memory and graphics cards, but I can't help but think that P2P and torrents have spoiled the majority of people into thinking that software should be free.