3DMARK Speed Way Tested – The DirectX 12 Ultimate Benchmark

UL Benchmarks has launched 3DMARK Speed Way for DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics cards 

Over the past few years, UL Benchmarks has slowly been creating feature tests for all of DirectX 12 Ultimate’s new features, releasing a dedicated ray tracing test in the form of 3DMARK Port Royal, alongside feature tests for Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Mesh Shaders, and Sampler Feedback. Now, UL Benchmarks has created a full DirectX 12 Ultimate gaming benchmark in the form of 3DMARK Speed Way, a test that is designed to compare the latest GPUs from Intel, Nvidia, and AMD to see who creates that strongest hardware for future PC games. 

With Mesh Shaders and DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1 real-time global illumination and reflections, 3DMARK Speed Way is designed to push modern GPUs to their limits. The benchmark requires Window 10 or Windows 11 64-bit to run, and a DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics card that features at least 6GB of video memory. Sorry AMD, your Radeon RX 6500 XT isn’t gonna cut it here.

Alongside the game’s standard benchmark, 3DMARK Speed Way also has a VS tool that you can use to compare benchmark runs with your friends, or to see if your system performance has increased or decreased over time. The tool also has a dedicated Speed Way Stress Test, that can test the reliability of hardware by placing it under a heavy sustained load. This tool can be useful for overclockers and system builders when they are overclocking or upgrading their systems.

More than just ray tracing

As mentioned before, 3DMARK Speed Way tests several aspects of DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics cards, and while ray tracing support is DirectX 12 Ultimate’s headline feature, other aspects of the API factor into how your GPU will perform within this benchmark.

With DirectX 12 Ultimate being so new, with many of its features requiring new add-ons to GPU architectures, it is likely that we will see large generational performance leaps when comparing new GPUs with their older counterparts. For many GPU manufacturers, ray tracing performance is currently a huge focus, though other aspects of a graphics card’s performance can also come into play. 

Today, we will be testing graphics cards from AMD’s RX 6000 series and Nvidia’s RTX 20/30 series’ of products. We plan to add data from an RTX 4090 graphics card as soon as we are able. Sadly, Intel did not sample us an ARC A700 series graphics card for testing, so we cannot include data for any of Intel’s ARC Alchemist series GPUs at this time. 

Please turn over to our next page to see our 3DMARK Speed Way data.