There's a new ray tracing benchmark in town and it paints an all-too-familiar picture of today's GPUs

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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in 1981, with the love affair starting on a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and a book on ZX Basic. He ended up becoming a physics and IT teacher, but by the late 1990s decided it was time to cut his teeth writing for a long defunct UK tech site.

If you want to test the ray tracing performance of a graphics card, you've got a few options. Most reviewers, including ourselves, will use the likes offor something a bit lighter. And you've got 3DMark's synthetic Port Royal, which is almost entirely ray traced. Now there'sfor Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS devices—that covers almost all bases, though Arm is somewhat noticeable by its absence.

As you can see, there's quite a big difference between the GPUs tested, but none of the results should come as a surprise. That's because the ray tracing performance of today's graphics cards is well known by PC Gamers—Nvidia's graphics chips are the most capable in this respect, followed by AMD and then Intel.

However, ray tracing doesn't just require specialised hardware units to accelerate BVH traversals and ray-triangle intersection calculations. It also needs a GPU that's really good at handling compute shaders—the forte of Ada Lovelace and RDNA 3 chips—and Breaking Limit uses aof compute shaders. I ran a GPU profiling analysis on the RTX 4080 Super during the Ultra test and at one point, 95% of all the shader units were flat out, running compute.

For PC Gamers, probably not and for a simple reason—it just doesn't look all that great. I don't think I'm being unfair here, as the entire benchmark is less than 1 GB to download. There's little chance of it being a visual tour-de-force with that amount of assets, even though it's quite a short benchmark.

 

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