It’s still unclear how AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards perform on the ray-tracing front, but prospective owners will be able to determine that upon their release with UL’s updated 3DMark benchmark suite, which now includes a feature test for DirectX ray tracing.
UL notes that the test comprises a fully ray-traced scene, which means that it’ll push the Ray Accelerators in the Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6800 to their very limits.
The DirectX Raytracing feature test should serve as a definitive way of deducing how AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs compare to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series in regard to ray tracing.
“The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test is designed to make ray-tracing performance the limiting factor,” UL noted. “Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass.”
“The result of the test depends entirely on ray-tracing performance, which means you can measure and compare the performance of dedicated ray-tracing hardware in the latest graphics cards.”
UL’s 3DMark benchmark suite is available on Steam for $29.99. An optional upgrade that contains Port Royal, the company’s original ray-tracing test, can also be purchased for $2.99.
As UL points out, NVIDIA’s monopoly on real-time ray tracing will end on November 18 with the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards.