RTX cards are breaking down with the 3DMark Ray Tracing Tech demo

Nvidia has always emphasized ray tracing as the great progress of its Turing architecture integrated with RTX graphics cards. (At least for gamers, the company is also courting developers working on artificial intelligence and the like.) Now, UL Benchmarks has released a new 3DMark Ray Tracing Tech demo to clearly demonstrate what tracing is capable of doing. on Nvidia. some products. The benchmark will eventually be presented as an update of the 3DMark benchmark.

Note that UL Benchmarks positions it as a technical demonstration, for now: it is not meant to be used to evaluate the tracing capabilities of RTX graphics cards. The demo is based on a benchmark that the company is working on, but it is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2018. UL Benchmarks will likely use the demo feedback and its own tests to determine the performance of the ray tracing.

UL Benchmarks has stated that the benchmark is in preparation since the demonstration of the DirectX Ray Tracing API with Microsoft. The company stated that it "was developed with the contribution of our benchmark development program partners, including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and other technology companies" and that she "worked in close collaboration with Microsoft to create a first class implementation of the DirectX Ray Tracing API ". . "

Having a Ray Tracing benchmark in 3DMark should make it easier to explain the effect of the feature on performance. We will also have an overview of this via games that support ray tracing, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Battlefield V, but having a specific benchmark will also be useful. (The effect on performance is likely to vary from one game to the other. It is best to take a look at the shelves via tools like this one.)

According to UL testing, the 3DMark Ray Tracing Tech demo is currently available to select members of the press – including Tom's Hardware – and we were asked not to publicly share a link to download the demo. We'll see what we can do to tell you more about exactly what the demo contains, and when it will be added to the 3DMark benchmark, before the release of the official benchmark later this year.