Preeminent benchmarking tool 3DMark is getting a new game-like benchmark to test DirectX 12 performance soon, according to the Futuremark blog. The new test, titled "Time Spy," is a look back to older 3DMark benchmarks with an original soundtrack by Markus "Captain" Kaarlonen from Finnish rock band Poets of the Fall.
The renderer for the benchmark is all-new, and specifically designed to test the latest in DX12 technologies including Explicit Multi-Adapter mode and Asynchronous Compute. Futuremark says the new test also has a heavy emphasis on multi-threading. 3DMark is arguably the most popular gaming-style benchmark around, so it recieves significant optimization efforts from AMD, Nvidia, and even Intel. Futuremark says it had the assistance of the three companies above and Microsoft when developing Time Spy.
This is good news for hardware review sites like us, as it will give us another data point with which to compare the latest hardware on the latest API besides the somewhat-controversial Ashes of the Singularity benchmark—even if 3DMark is a purely synthetic test. Time Spy isn't available yet, but it's "coming soon" to all Windows 3DMark versions. In case you don't have 3DMark, it's actually on sale in the Steam Summer Sale for just five measly bucks.