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3DMark Tests Galore!

3DMark Time Spy has been our primary DirectX 12 benchmark test for gaming PCs running Windows 10 for years. This DirectX 12 Feature Level 11_0 benchmark utilizes a pure DirectX 12 game engine that supports features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading! The developers opted to use DirectX 12 Feature Level 11_0 to ensure wide compatibility with DirectX 11 hardware through DirectX 12 drivers.

3DMark Time Spy

We ran 3DMark Time Spy with the standard settings and got the following results:

3DMark Port Royal

3DMark Port Royal entered the market in 2019 as the worlds first dedicated real-time ray tracing benchmark for gamers. We’ve never included this benchmark before, but now that NVIDIA has more than one generation of cards on the market that have hardware support for real-time ray tracing performance, it was time to include it in our testing. We ran the default test without the demo.

3DMark VRS Feature Test

The Variable-Rate Shading (VRS) Benchmark feature test in 3DMark got updated at the end of 2019 and now includes a Tier 2. Tier 2 adds more flexibility and control by allowing different shading rates within each draw call.

NVIDIA DLSS Feature Test

Another new benchmark added by UL to 3DMark in 2019 was the NVIDIA DLSS feature test. This new test helps you compare performance and image quality with and without DLSS processing. The test is based on the 3DMark Port Royal ray tracing benchmark that uses Temporal Anti-Aliasing. TAA usage can result in blurring and the loss of fine detail and that can be regained by the NVIDIA RTX technology called DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). DLSS uses deep learning and AI to improve game performance while maintaining visual quality.

DLSS obviously doesn’t work on NVIDIA GeForce GTX series and AMD Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards, but we included the ‘DLSS OFF’ performance numbers for those series.

3DMark DirectX Raytracing Feature Test

This is one of the first synthetic benchmarks that has been developed to compare the performance of the dedicated ray-tracing hardware capabilities in graphics cards. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test was designed to make ray-tracing performance the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering techniques, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass. This test uses features from DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1 to create a realistic ray-traced depth of field effects and the rendering resolution is 2560 1440. Camera rays are randomized with per-pixel offsets. There are 12 samples for each pixel when running the test with default settings. We left the test at its default settings for our benchmarking.

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!