Fire Strike Ultra lets you test your PC at 4K, even if you don’t have a 4K monitor

By Konrad Krawczyk October 14, 2014

fire strike ultra tests graphics cards at 4k resolution firestrike — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Futuremark, the developer of the popular 3DMark and PCMark computing benchmarking suites, has released an update to the former that allows users to run tests at 4K resolution.

The new 4K benchmark is called Fire Strike Ultra, and it’s a more demanding version of Fire Strike, which already was the most stressful test that 3DMark had in its arsenal.

The sweet part of this update is that you don’t need a 4K monitor in order to see if your rig can handle 4K workloads. How? We got some insight from Futuremark.

“3DMark renders the test content internally at 4K Ultra HD resolution (3840 x 2160),” Futuremark said when speaking to Digital Trends. “This output is then scaled to your Windows desktop display resolution.”

There are some conditions that you need to satisfy in order to run this test, though. For starters, you’ll need a graphics card with at least 3GB of RAM. On top of that, you’ll need either 3DMark Advanced Edition, or 3DMark Professional Editon in order to get access to Fire Strike Ultra. Users of 3DMark Basic Edition will have to upgrade to one of the other versions.

3DMark Advanced Edition costs $24.95, and we recommend that you grab that version if you want to get your hands on Fire Strike Ultra. That’s mostly because 3DMark Professional Edition costs $995.

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Konrad Krawczyk

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…

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