Futuremark Teases 3DMark Time Spy Benchmark Built From The Ground Up For DirectX 12
Futuremark is working on an update to its popular 3DMark benchmarking suite that will test the DirectX 12 capabilities of your gaming system. Called Time Spy, the new benchmark sports a "pure DirectX 12 engine" that was built from scratch to support the new features of DX12, including asynchronous compute, explicit mulit-adapater, and of course multi-threading.
In anticipation of the new benchmark, Futuremark released a teaser trailer that's just over a minute long. Futuremark says it provides a "glimpse of gaming's future while revisiting classic 3DMark scenes from the past" and challenges viewers to see how many of them they can spot.
There's been a lot of hype surrounding the DX12, an API that's only available in Windows 10. The major upshot to DX12 is that it offers developers lower level access to hardware resources, similar to Vulkan. By having deeper access to CPU and GPU resources, it reduces overhead and increases programming efficiency, the end result of which is better performance—Microsoft claims a performance bump of 20 percent in GPU performance and up to a 50 percent improvement in overall CPU usage.
DirectX has a long history in PC gaming. It first debuted way back in Windows 95 when many games were still being written for MS-DOS and it's evolved over time. However, it's never provided low level access to resources until DX12. Between that and Microsoft's decision to make DX12 exclusive to Windows 10, it's received a lot of attention.
There are several games that already take advantage of DX12, including Ashes of the Singularity, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. As time goes on, more and more games will come out that support DX12.
As for the Time Spy benchmark, it was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, along with other members of Futuremark's Benchmark Development Program. The teaser trailer also coincides with Steam's summer sale, which has 3DMark reduced 80 percent to $4.99.
