A new OpenGL 3D benchmark has arrived from a rather unlikely source: a Czech chap that goes by the name, Stepan Hrbek, has developed it and it looks rather quite promising.

Lightsmark works with any OpenGL 2.0 compatible GPU, but you need to use drivers dated from October this year or newer for it to work. If you own a GeForce 5-series or a Radeon 9500-series or better card, then you can have a go at testing out the benchmark. Apparently, it doesn't work with any other hardware due to graphics driver or GPU limitations.

It works under Windows XP and Vista, both 32 and 64-bit versions. You also need 500MB of free disk space and at least 512MB of RAM, depending on the OS you're using.

Before Lightsmark, realtime global illumination was limited to small scenes, small resolutions, small speeds, specially crafted scenes with handmade optimizations. Lightsmark breaks all limits at once, running in reasonably sized scene (220000 triangles) in high resolution (1680x1050) at excellent speed (100-400fps). Lighting is computed fully automatically in original unmodified scene from 2007 game World of Padman, not tweaked for Lightsmark and with all sorts of geometrical difficulties, with extra rooms hidden below floor etc.

You can find the official website here and the download is a mere 29MB.