Last Thursday, UL Solutions celebrated the 25th birthday of 3DMark, the evergreen game graphics benchmarking tool. Since the early days of DirectX 6, there’s been a version of the tool, showing off the latest graphics features and technology, and although it’s not quite as ubiquitous as it was, you can’t deny that two-and-a-half decades is an impressive run for a piece of software.

If you’ve never used 3DMark before, it’s an application that runs a sequence of real-time graphics on your PC, using the recorded frame rates to give your system an overall score. The idea is that more points mean better for gaming, and you can upload your result and check against other PCs with the same hardware.

The version that started it all off, called 3DMark99 (even though it was released in…