Benchmarking company Futuremark has recently introduced a new benchmark to its VRMark suite, the Cyan Room, which brings the latest in rendering technologies to the VR world. Futuremark expects this test to leverage the latest hardware and software developments in DX12 to better utilize today's GPUs still somewhat untapped power. In something of a plot twist, AMD's Radeon architectures (in the form of Polaris 20-based RX 580 and Vega-based RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64) trump NVIDIA's equivalent offerings in pure performance numbers.

Testing was performed by pairing a Ryzen 7 1800X CPU with a selection of graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA, supported by 16GB of DDR4-2933 system memory, and Windows 10 x64. In a post on Radeon gaming, Scott Wasson said that "The Cyan Room (...) highlights AMD's continued performance leadership on this (VR) front," adding that "the Radeon GPUs we tested have clear leads over their direct competition. What's more, all the Radeon GPUs are meeting the key requirement for today's VR headsets by delivering at least 90 frames per second in this test."

Adding to its staple of benchmarking suites, Futuremark has announced the upcoming release of their latest benchmark, dubbed "Cyan Room". this is a Bioshock-esque benchmark that was made for DX12-powered, VR-enabled workloads, and should let users know just how much processing grunt they have at their disposal. It uses a pure DirectX 12 engine built in-house and optimized for VR, besides featuring "a large, complex environment and many eye-catching effects."

The Cyan Room can be explored at the users' leisure through its "Experience Mode"; it's a benchmarking experience where users can actually change the rendering resolution and other settings to make the scene more or less demanding, on the fly. This should allow users to truly gauge the difference in experience according to achieved performance in the benchmark - the company says "using Experience mode with a VR headset is a great way to see how system performance affects your VR experience." With its massive 5K rendering resolution and spectacular volumetric lighting effects, the company says it sets a high bar for future hardware generations. Cyan Room will be released on November 22 as a free update for VRMark Advanced Edition and VRMark Professional Edition.