With the Port Royal, UL Benchmarks has already integrated a ray tracing test in 3DMark. This is also part of our current graphics card tests. Now there is a second test called “3DMark DirectX Raytracing Feature Test”. UL Benchmark announces it with regard to the appearance of the Radeon-RX – 6000 – series starts in mid-November, but of course it also runs as a DXR-compatible benchmark on the GeForce RTX cards from NVIDIA based on the Turing and Ampere architecture.

The 3DMark DirectX ray tracing feature test is obviously a path tracing. In other words: not just individual effects, but the entire scene are calculated using ray tracing. Therefore, the test should be able to fully demonstrate the ray tracing performance of the hardware without a hybrid component in the rendering playing a role.

By default, twelve samples per pixel are used. The standard resolution is 2. 560 x 1. 440. In the previous Port Royal test, the same resolution is used, but here a classic rendering pipeline is used in addition to ray tracing.

The benchmark runs automatically about 45 seconds and then shows the final result in the form of frames per second. There is also an interactive mode in which the user can move freely through the Pathtraced 3D world. Here you can change the Field of View to adjust the depth of field effect.

With a GeForce RTX 3080 we have in the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing Feature Test 47, reached 7 FPS. A GeForce RTX 3070 comes on 32, 4 FPS and a GeForce RTX 3080 on 56, 5 FPS. How the Radeon RX 6000, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 Beat XT, we’ll see later.

The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing Feature Test is available to all licensees who have purchased the license after January 8th 2019. If you bought the Port Royal test as DLC, you now get the new ray tracing benchmark in addition to the DLSS feature test.