Although Futuremark has had a DX12 API test available in the past, it’s looking to retain its relevance as the most popular benchmarking utility for current and next-generation graphics with the debut of its new, fully DirectX12 Time Spy demo. It’s not out yet, so don’t rush out to buy it, but we now have our first look at what the graphics test will look like — along with a reminder of some of 3Dmark’s various benchmarks from its long history.
In the short trailer for the new benchmark, we can see that Futuremark has once again outdone itself on the visuals. They’re so detailed, so crisp, so hyper-realistic, and yet grounded in a believable world. As our protagonist for this short sequence makes their way through a museum of sorts, we can see some of 3Dmark’s benchmark tests of yesteryear captured within glass cabinets.
Moving on from the Mad Onion years, though, this benchmark is built from the ground up with DirectX12 in mind, and that means it supports a lot of exciting new features, such as asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading.
Co-developed with help from AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and Microsoft, Futuremark made it clear in its blog post that it wants Time Spy to showcase all of the exciting, low-level features of DirectX12 and what it’s capable of.
What’s going to be really interesting about this benchmark is whether the promised performance improvements of DirectX12 mean that it’s not as taxing on our hardware as a previous generation benchmark like Fire Strike has been.
Of course all of this is being pushed out there at a convenient time for Futuremark, which just cut the price of its 3Dmark benchmark to $5 on Steam as part of the big Summer Sale. So if your interest is piqued, now wouldn’t be a bad time to get on board the Futuremark train.
This new benchmark gives us a great idea for a VR Steam Library of the future. How about a museum-like selection of games, where you look down on levels or sequences from them. We can’t be the only ones thinking that’d be cool, right?
