Tuesday, November 3rd 2020
UL Benchmarks Updates 3DMark with Ray-Tracing Feature Test
The launch of AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards on November 18 will end NVIDIA's monopoly on real-time raytracing. For the first time, gamers will have a choice of GPU vendors when buying a raytracing-capable graphics card. Today, we're releasing a new 3DMark feature test that measures pure raytracing performance. You can use the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test to compare the performance of the dedicated raytracing hardware in the latest graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA.
Real-time raytracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that's optimized for raytracing operations. Despite the advances in GPU performance, the demands are still too high for a game to rely on raytracing alone. That's why games use raytracing to complement traditional rendering techniques. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test is designed to make raytracing performance the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass.
DOWNLOAD: 3DMark v2.15.7078
The result of the test depends entirely on raytracing performance, which means you can measure and compare the performance of dedicated raytracing hardware in the latest graphics cards.
Compared with traditional rendering, raytracing can more accurately model how light interacts with the aperture of a camera.
In this feature test, camera rays are traced across the field of view with small random offsets to simulate a depth of field effect. The frame rate is determined by the time taken to trace and shade a set number of samples for each pixel, combine the results with previous samples and present the output on the screen. You can change the sample count to see how it affects performance and visual quality. The rendering resolution is 2560 × 1440.
The result of the test is the average frame rate in frames per second. You can read more about the test in the 3DMark technical guide.
Interactive mode
The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test includes an interactive mode that lets you move freely around the scene and take screenshots. You can control the focus point and aperture of the camera to explore different depth of field effects using raytracing.
Test your graphics card with 3DMark
3DMark includes several tests to help you measure and compare the performance of the latest graphics cards.
The DirectX Raytracing feature test is available now as a free update for 3DMark Advanced Edition.
3DMark Advanced Edition owners who purchased 3DMark before January 8, 2019, will need to upgrade to unlock the latest raytracing tests. The 3DMark Port Royal upgrade DLC adds Port Royal, the DirectX Raytracing feature test, and the NVIDIA DLSS feature test. Find out more about 3DMark updates and upgrades.
3DMark Professional Edition
The DirectX Raytracing feature test is available as a free update for 3DMark Professional Edition customers with a valid annual license. Customers with an older, perpetual license will need to purchase an annual license to unlock the test.
Real-time raytracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that's optimized for raytracing operations. Despite the advances in GPU performance, the demands are still too high for a game to rely on raytracing alone. That's why games use raytracing to complement traditional rendering techniques. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test is designed to make raytracing performance the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass.
The result of the test depends entirely on raytracing performance, which means you can measure and compare the performance of dedicated raytracing hardware in the latest graphics cards.
Compared with traditional rendering, raytracing can more accurately model how light interacts with the aperture of a camera.
In this feature test, camera rays are traced across the field of view with small random offsets to simulate a depth of field effect. The frame rate is determined by the time taken to trace and shade a set number of samples for each pixel, combine the results with previous samples and present the output on the screen. You can change the sample count to see how it affects performance and visual quality. The rendering resolution is 2560 × 1440.
The result of the test is the average frame rate in frames per second. You can read more about the test in the 3DMark technical guide.
Interactive mode
The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test includes an interactive mode that lets you move freely around the scene and take screenshots. You can control the focus point and aperture of the camera to explore different depth of field effects using raytracing.
Test your graphics card with 3DMark
3DMark includes several tests to help you measure and compare the performance of the latest graphics cards.
- Use the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test to measure the performance of dedicated raytracing hardware
- Run the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark to test graphics performance with a game-like mix of traditional DirectX 12 rendering and real-time raytracing
- Run 3DMark Time Spy Extreme to test and compare DirectX 12 performance
- Use 3DMark Stress Tests to check GPU stability and cooling performance over longer periods of heavy load
The DirectX Raytracing feature test is available now as a free update for 3DMark Advanced Edition.
3DMark Advanced Edition owners who purchased 3DMark before January 8, 2019, will need to upgrade to unlock the latest raytracing tests. The 3DMark Port Royal upgrade DLC adds Port Royal, the DirectX Raytracing feature test, and the NVIDIA DLSS feature test. Find out more about 3DMark updates and upgrades.
3DMark Professional Edition
The DirectX Raytracing feature test is available as a free update for 3DMark Professional Edition customers with a valid annual license. Customers with an older, perpetual license will need to purchase an annual license to unlock the test.
20 Comments on UL Benchmarks Updates 3DMark with Ray-Tracing Feature Test
@btarunr Is TPU going to use it as a RayTracing performance indicator in the graphics cards testing suite?
While most games might not look different, some gams like ray-traced minecraft is completely gaming changing for me.
I've seen the RT games and played a bit. You are right. The RT brings something new to the game but still the support and DXR is something of a premium. Also, we need to look at the implementation in games to be slightly easier or should I say, more common than it is now.
Besides, if RT, sooner or later floods the market and we you will have 30 games supporting it or more, will you evaluate and test each one individually or just certain games? How many RT supporting games in a review you will be able to test maximum? Just a point here. If not all how will you pick these games?
Besides, it would be a great deal to evaluate how this RT 3Dmark stacks up with the performance against your own measurements by individual game suite of 10 for example. Will the measurement match or be totally off.
Or the extremely low resolution reflections that do not seem to update in every frame for the AMD metallic/robot raytracing demo (look at the reflection of the robot in the mirrors next to the control console it's accessing)(go to: 0:48):
And also from the RX 6000 presentation, blocky raytraced shadows, that seem to be computed from a low-poly model instead of the high-poly model drawn by the rasterization pass (look at the shadow the character casts when it gets close to the light source with RT enabled)(go to 18:30):
I don't think it would be fair/valid to compare performance of two implementations, if one of them produces inferior quality. I think Steve from GamersNexus mentioned having to do something like that, but I don't remember whether that was in relation to raytracing quality or maybe the future DLSS alternative from AMD.
EDIT: I had to unlink the videos, as they were not starting at the specified timestamps.
EDIT 2: That did not help, so I just added the timestamps as text. Is there a way to turn off the youtube video widget somehow and just share a plain link?
The video is here (screenshots taken from a 4K output at 0:32 and 1:19):
If the card doesn't have sufficient processing power for ray-tracing, it should be up to the users to tune down the "quality" setting, but the same setting should give the same results.
At the end, there maybe difference, but the difference should be insignificant enough that it won't be seen in most scenes.
But instead of pointless speculation, lets wait for the cards to actually be released, im sure plenty of channels (Gamers Nexus, Global Foundry's) will find it interesting to compare every facet of ray tracing between the two brands (and eventually Intel if that ever comes to pass).
Should watch Global Foundry's recent vid on Watchdogs Legion, pretty deep dive in the RT it has to offer.
The rendering will be the same on AMD and Nvidia. Game Devs won't implement AMD or Nvidia ray tracing but Vulcan or DXR ray tracing. Both cards will perform better or worst depending on what the developers do their implementation. I suspect that they will have in the settings different option to set different Ray Tracing level. Shitty devs will do shitty implementation where some others devs will have a very polish implementation.
That is already the case right now with Offline renderer. Anyone who did some blender or others software know that it's easy to do a render, it's hard to make things look good.
As for how AMD and Nvidia will really perform in the end in future games, we will have to wait for benchmark.