Futuremark has been ahead of the curve when it comes to 3D rendered lighting for the past two decades, regularly showing off what the most beautiful, resource-intensive lighting available at the time and for the next few years will be. Sure its benchmarks might have fallen behind big developers when it comes to aesthetics -- it can't employ thousands of artists like Ubisoft can -- but its benchmarks are at the top of the pile when it comes to testing what your system can do.
And now it's going to release a benchmark for anyone looking to tap into the Ray Tracing performance of the new Nvidia RTX cards which are set to release on September 20. It's set to be incorporated right into 3DMark, so owners of the benchmark won't need to do anything but update their software to see it. It's based around the Time Spy Test that shows off some of the classic benchmarks from 3Dmark's of yesteryear and doubles down on reflections again and again.
You won't have to own an RTX card to enjoy the new benchmark, or try out its new Ray Tracing features -- it uses DirectX12, so as long as your card can handle that, it can try its luck at ray tracing. But the RTX-series is likely to perform an order of magnitude better than on older hardware, but we don't know just yet. We could find that AMD's Vega knocks it out of the park -- we'll have to wait and see.
We haven't been given a firm release date for the update yet, but PCGamer has it that UL Benchmarks -- Futuremark's parent company -- plans to release it alongside the next major Windows Update, which should arrive this fall if past release patterns are anything to go by.
