EzBench's latest GPU stress test reportedly brings the RTX 5090 down to 15 FPS at 4K

Norwegian developer EzBench's NukeMark is a fairly new commercial GPU stress test (announced nearly two months ago), and it is available in early access on Steam. It's built in Unreal Engine 5.7, and pitched as an "adversarial" benchmark that intentionally runs the engine's heaviest features at once — Nanite virtualized geometry, the MegaLights many-light system, hardware-accelerated Lumen ray tracing, and 8K virtual textures. There is no attempt to stay within the performance budget a shipping game would respect.

According to EzBench's own figures, the benchmark's flagship scene holds Nvidia's RTX 5090 to roughly 15-20 frames per second at native 4K (with no upscaling). Those numbers come from the developer's press materials rather than independent testing so far, though EzBench says it's making review builds, a technical white paper, and reference results across current flagship GPUs available to press for verification.

Also, NukeMark isn't EzBench's first attempt at stressing Unreal Engine hardware. The studio's four-person team, which includes Ezekiel Hauge, previously released the original EzBench back in 2022. It was a free UE5 demo built around 8K textures and ray tracing that was demanding enough to bring even flagship GPUs of that era to their knees. NukeMark is pretty much a spiritual successor targeted specifically towards ray tracing, instead of raw rasterization load.

The tool runs two named scenes rather than one: Emberhold, which the developer says stresses lighting and shadow rendering, and Pandora for VRAM capacity, reportedly consuming 12-15GB+ at 4K. EzBench also says native and DLSS-upscaled runs are tracked on separate leaderboards. This avoids the common practice of ranking upscaled scores against native ones. "We built the missing piece: a real-engine, ray-traced load that finds the GPU's ceiling," Hauge said in a statement.

Read more about NukeMark on Steam.