New 3DMark test measures pure ray-tracing performance
The launch of AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards on November 18 will end NVIDIA’s monopoly on real-time ray tracing. For the first time, gamers will have a choice of GPU vendors when buying a ray-tracing-capable graphics card.
Today, we’re releasing a new 3DMark feature test that measures pure ray-tracing performance. You can use the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test to compare the performance of the dedicated ray-tracing hardware in the latest graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA.
3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test
Real-time ray tracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that’s optimized for ray-tracing operations. Despite the advances in GPU performance, the demands are still too high for a game to rely on ray tracing alone. That’s why games use ray tracing to complement traditional rendering techniques.
The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test is designed to make ray-tracing 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 ray-tracing performance, which means you can measure and compare the performance of dedicated ray-tracing hardware in the latest graphics cards.
Compared with traditional rendering, ray tracing 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.
