Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Eye candy: Platige Image’s Catzilla benchmark short

[Originally posted on: 16 October 2012. Scroll down for the update.]

Legendary Polish studio Platige Image has taken a short break from its cinematics and animation work to help produce a new PC benchmark test – and to judge by the trailer, it’s one of the craziest yet seen.

Not your typical Platige production
Platige is best known for work like its amazing Witcher 2 cinematic and award-winning short Paths of Hate.

But for the upcoming Catzilla benchmark, the studio has teamed up with the Plastic demoscene group and ALLPlayer to create what it describes as “a short animated film, like Pixar, but in real time”.

The Pixar analogy may be stretching things a bit: the trailer for Catzilla is certainly cartoonier than Platige’s usual impeccable photorealism – but we don’t remember Wall-E including any giant bipedal cats.

Particularly not giant bipedal cats nuking cities with their laser eyeballs.

Available for Windows machines of all stripes
Platige says that the benchmark itself will test both OpenGL and DirectX, and run on any version of Windows from XP onwards, including Windows 8.

It should run on most netbooks and Ultrabooks – which would make it more of a general-purpose tool than graphics-focused tests such as Cinebench or SPECvwiewperf – but it looks a hell of a lot of fun to run.

Updated 8 January 2012: Catzilla has now been released. We’ve updated the embedded video at the top of the story to show the entire two-minute-plus animation, not just the trailer.

According to the short’s Vimeo page, the project was intended to be the antithesis of other benchmark productions, “which are mostly boring and aesthetically weak” – and certainly, ‘boring’ is not the adjective you’d choose here.

Platige has also posted a making-of article on Behance, which includes some nice concept art and visuals from both the website and the marketing campaign.

Download the Catzilla benchmark