Updated | 3DMark to get a new ray tracing test in September

Update —

UL Benchmarks reached out to us to clarify that Time Spy will not be changed in any manner and that it was a misunderstanding by TechSpot, which originally broke the story. UL clarified that altering Time Spy would invalidate comparisons with previous scores, which they do not intend to. Instead, UL is designing a completely new test from the ground up for the 3DMark suite that will utilize Microsoft DirectX Ray tracing (DXR). The results produced by this new ray tracing test are independent and cannot be compared with results from Time Spy and Fire Strike. 

We thank UL for clarifying the above to our readers and look forward to trying out the new benchmark ourselves upon release. 

Original Article —

NVIDIA's new Turing-based GeForce RTX are the topic of discussion on almost every tech forum out there. From reports of NVIDIA cajoling suppliers to push for the newer RTX cards to controversial recommendations from tech sites that quickly became rancorous, we've seen it all. That said, once these GPUs finally become available next month, benchmark programs need to get updated to evaluate the ray tracing prowess of these new cards and looks like 3DMark Time Spy is all geared up for it.

TechSpot reached out to UL Benchmarks (formerly Futuremark), the developer behind the popular 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, who confirmed that they are indeed working on adding ray tracing to the benchmark. In fact, the company already demonstrated a ray tracing demo using Microsoft's DirectX 12 Ray tracing feature (DXR) at GDC this year (video embedded below). UL Benchmarks did not disclose a concrete date for availability of the new version but was optimistic that the release will 'align with the launch of Redstone 5'. Redstone 5 is the codename for the upcoming feature update to Windows 10 slated to rollout sometime at September end. 

Unigine was also apparently contacted to know about a possible update to their Heaven graphics benchmark but the company is yet to respond. In all likelihood, Heaven will also be updated to accommodate the new ray tracing capabilities of the RTX cards.

The benefits of splurging on NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX cards have been much debated although, the actual reviews themselves will be available only after September 20. The recent demo of a gameplay of the Shadow of the Tomb Raider on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti sounded off the alarm bells as the game struggled to sustain 60fps at 1080p with RTX effects turned on. While things are still nascent at this point, it is not hard to see that many gamers will look to turn off RTX to pump out more fps.

Source(s)