3DMARK Speed Way Tested – The DirectX 12 Ultimate Benchmark

Conclusion – Things are going to get interesting

The move towards DirectX 12 Ultimate has been a strange one. The standard remains relatively new, and right now there appears to be no games that make use of the API’s entire feature set. With backwards compatibility with older graphics hardware being a major concern for developers, many studios have delayed their adoption of hardware accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders, and most other DirectX 12 Ultimate features. Simply put, the install base of DirectX 12 Ultimate hardware remains low, and developers do not want to limit their games to small audiences. 

As we move further into the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 generation of hardware, developers will become more interested in the feature set of modern console/PC hardware. As it stands, legacy hardware (both PC and console) are holding back the adoption of DirectX 12 Ultimate’s feature set. Even so, the industry is reaching a turning point. More and more new games are being revealed as “current-gen-only” titles, and that will make DirectX 12 Ultimate a big deal. 

With regards to 3DMARK Speed Way, the usefulness of the scores that it provides are currently questionable. That said, these scores will become increasingly relevant as developers start launching games that require a DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics card. Sooner or later, ray tracing, mesh shaders, and other DX12 Ultimate features will become mandatory features for new PC games.

The DirectX 12 Ultimate API brings many new hardware features to the table, and with that comes opportunities for GPU manufacturers to deliver significant generational performance leaps by accelerating specific aspects of their graphics architectures. Currently, GPU manufacturers are focusing on the ray tracing performance of their graphics cards. In a sense, ray tracing is the new tessellation, in some games ray tracing performance matters a lot, while in others it has a small or minor impact. The same could be true for mesh shaders once they start getting used in games.

3DMARK Speed Way is UL Benchmarks’ outlooks into the future of the GPU market, and the results of our testing showcase that there are a lot of opportunities for new GPU architectures to have a huge impact on the performance of future games. We can already see that Nvidia’s RTX 30 series sits far ahead of their RTX 20 series, and it is likely that Nvidia’s RTX 40 series will showcase similar benefits. It makes me wonder how well AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics architecture will do in this test, and how Intel’s new ARC A-series GPU stand up. One thing’s for sure, the GPU market is about to get very interesting.

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