3DMARK now contains a "pure ray-tracing" feature test - Ready for the Radeon RX 6000 series

November 2020 is the month where ray tracing enters the mainstream gaming market, moving away from the realms of future-tech and into the homes of gamers across the globe.  

This month, AMD will unleash its Radeon RX 6000 series of graphics cards, Sony will launch their PlayStation 5 and Microsoft will release their Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S systems. With these new products, hardware-accelerated ray tracing will move from being an Nvidia-only technology to become a technology that's accessible to gamers across both the console and PC markets. 

Ray Tracing performance will soon be a critical aspect for all new graphics cards, and dedicated software is required to allow gamers to judge how powerful new hardware is under full raytracing workloads. To cater to this need, UL Benchmarks has added a new DirectX Raytracing feature test to 3DMARK. 

This new feature test doesn't;t use a hybrid renderer like 3DMARK Port Royal, it uses a full try-traced scene to push new graphics cards to their limits. This new feature test will be available as a free update for 3DMark Advanced Edition. The test will contain a test mode and an "Interactive Mode", which will allow users to freely move around UL Benchmark's test scene and take screenshots. 

Unlike 3DMARK Port Royal, this test is not a new 3DMARK benchmarking application. As such, this mode will not produce a score which can be compared to other systems. While framerate data will be available for comparison purposes, this tool was not designed with benchmarking in mind.