Users who recently bought a new NVIDIA GTX 1080, GTX 1070 or the new AMD Radeon RX 480 can now test out how it performs in DX12 thanks Futuremark's new 3DMark FireStrike Time Spy benchmark.
The new DX12 benchmark from 3DMark FireStrike has been teased several weeks back. It is a huge step for the benchmarking tool as its current FireStrike tests only measure the performance of a video card's performance in DX11.
While there are still just a number of games running in DX12 such as the recent Ashes of the Singularity and Square Enix's Rise of the Tomb Raider, the support will eventually increase and it could become mainstream in 2017. The new 3DMark FireStrike Time Spy benchmark can give users an idea on whether their cards will still be able to handle the new games next year.
Another great feature of the new Time Spy benchmark in 3DMark FireStrike is that it also measures the GPU's performance with asynchronous compute, PC World has learned. Of course, users who want to test the new benchmark will have to have Windows 10 as their operating system.
Cards that perform well in the Time Spy DX12 benchmark are obviously the new ones such as the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 from NVIDIA. The AMD Radeon RX 480 also holds up well although not as good as its Team Green counterpart.
Compared to the previous Fire Strike tests, the new 3DMark Time Spy benchmark has significantly higher demand for graphics power. The Time Spy Graphics test 2 alone has 40 million vertices compared to the 3DMark Fire Strike test 1's 3.9 million, Anandtech reported.
Both 3DMark Time Spy Graphics tests also have 70 million compute shader invocations compared to the measly 8.1 million from the 3DMark FireStrike test 2. In some tests, the RX 480 was close to the GTX 1070 by two to three hundred points.
The new benchmark certainly uses async compute to maximize the utilization of the GPU. However, users can still choose to turn it off for interesting results.
Interested users who want to try it out can buy the 3DMark Advanced Edition for $30. Those who already have the software can buy the Time Spy DX12 benchmark for $10 but those who already own it on Steam can just update it for free.