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UL, the company behind the popular 3DMark benchmark, has announced a new benchmark later this year. That 3DMark Speed Way Test was designed to punish DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics cards. It will demonstrate real-time global illumination effects with ray tracing. UL says that there will be support for mesh and variable rate shaders.
This test is sponsored by the Lenovo Legion brand, which means you’ll likely see it mentioned in the test, much like we see Galaxy in the Time Spy test and MSI in Fire Strike.
UL says Speed Way will launch “later this year” via Steam. We expect it to be released as a standalone download directly from UL at some point, as overclockers in particular won’t want to install Steam to run the test. It’s also unclear if current 3DMark owners will need to buy Speed Way or if it will be included as DLC.
3DMark remains a very popular benchmark, but it can be a bit unbalanced in terms of CPU benchmarks and tendency to overestimate the impact of a powerful CPU. However, tests like the ray tracing subtest are brutal on graphics cards, and we hope this test will be the same. This applies not only to current GPUs but also to those that will appear in the next few years.
I have had a love-hate relationship with 3Dmark for many years. As a former extreme overclocker, I’ve always found it difficult to deal with GPU clock speeds and cold bugs during subtests, as well as the nagging feeling of having a pass run for a few seconds to completion before crashing.
While my days of ln2 overclocking are over, I’m sure I’ll end up with a couple hundred or more hours of Speed Way usage. Funny, but somehow sad.
