Today is the day we officially say goodbye to Jane Nash. Futuremark has announced they will soon stop supporting its 3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage benchmarks. The company has taken the decision to end support in light of the fact that Microsoft is withdrawing support for Windows Vista on April 11 of this year. Futuremark Vantage benchmark support will end on the same day.

The withdrawal of support for 3DMark and PC Mark Vantage means the following; the benchmark will no longer sold be Futuremark, the benchmarks will no longer receive updates (other than SystemInfo), they will no longer work with Futuremark online services including the result validation services and customer support. From April 11th, both benchmarks will be available for free as ‘legacy’ benchmarks.

3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage are DirectX 10-based benchmarks, designed to work specifically on the Windows Vista OS. It was released in April 2008 and succeeded the DirectX 9-based 3DMark06. According to Futuremark it no longer makes sense for them to support a benchmark designed to run on an OS that is ten years old and no longer supported by Microsoft. According to StatCounter only 1.12% of users currently still run Windows Vista.

You can read the full announcement from Futuremark here.