Benchmarks of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 (formerly known as the RTX 4080 16 GB) are already out as the leaky taps in the Asian tech forumscape know no bounds. Someone with access to an RTX 4080 sample and drivers on ChipHell forums, put it through a battery of synthetic and gaming tests. The $1,200 MSRP graphics card was tested on 3DMark Time Spy, Port Royal, and games that include Forza Horizon 5, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, Cyberpunk 2077, Borderlands 3, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

The big picture: the RTX 4080 is found to be halfway between the RTX 3090 Ti and the RTX 4090. At stock settings, and in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme (4K), it has 71% the performance of an RTX 4090, whereas the RTX 3090 Ti is 55% that of the RTX 4090. With its "power limit" slider maxed out, the RTX 4080 inches 2 percentage-points closer to the RTX 4090 (73% that of the RTX 4090), and with a bit of manual OC, it adds another 4 percentage-points. Things change slightly with 3DMark Port Royal, where the RTX 4080 is 69% the performance of the RTX 4090 in a test where the RTX 3090 Ti does 58% that of the RTX 4090.

UL Benchmarks is ready with a new graphics benchmark for enthusiast-segment graphics cards, to show you whether your present hardware can deal with games coming out several years from now. The new "Speed Way" benchmark utilizes all of the features that make up the DirectX 12 Ultimate API, which include real-time ray tracing, mesh shaders, variable-rate shading, and sampler feedback. It uses ray tracing for reflections, lighting, and global-illumination.

Until now, the various DirectX 12 Ultimate features were only part of 3DMark as API feature-tests. The older "Port Royal" benchmark, which released around the time of NVIDIA "Turing," is the company's first benchmark with real-time ray tracing, although it doesn't use all DirectX 12 Ultimate features. With each new benchmark, the makers of 3DMark collaborate with a new gaming brand sponsor. For Speed Way, it's Legion, a brand of pre-built gaming notebooks and desktops by Lenovo. UL Benchmarks didn't reveal an exact release date except "later this year."

The 3DMark Port Royal single card benchmark has a new record of 20,014 set by South Korean overclocker biso biso for Team EVGA. The overclocker used an Intel Core i9-12900K running at 5.4 GHz on an EVGA Z690 Dark Kingpin motherboard paired with the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 Kingpin overclocked to 2,895 MHz. The system also featured 16 GB of DDR5 memory running at 6000 MHz from SK Hynix along with liquid nitrogen for cooling and Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme thermal paste on the CPU and GPU. This new record beats the previous record of 19,600 also from biso biso which featured the Core i9-10900K and RTX 3090 Kingpin.

EVGAArmed with the latest hardware, including an EVGA Z690 DARK K|NGP|N motherboard, and an EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 K|NGP|N running at a blistering 2,895 MHz GPU clock, extreme overclocker "biso biso" set a new single-GPU standard for 3DMark Port Royal with a score of 20,014! This marks the first ever 3DMark Port Royal (single card) score over 20,000 and a testiment to the capabilities of the highest performing EVGA products.

PC enthusiasts on the Bili Bili community posted the first performance benchmarks of the Made-by-AMD liquid-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card, which has been doing rounds on the rumor mill as an "XTX" part. This card features engine clock speeds in the league of the recent RX 6900 XT "XTXH silicon" factory-overclocked cards, but its more striking specification is the use of 18.48 Gbps-rated GDDR6 memory (15.5% increased memory bandwidth), and liquid cooling. The engine clocks are set at 2250 MHz game, with 2435 MHz boost.

Tested across 3DMark Time Spy, Time Spy Extreme, Fire Stike Extreme, and Port Royal, the card is tested to be anywhere between 5-8 percent faster than an air-cooled reference RX 6900 XT card. This would put it slightly behind the custom RX 6900 XT ("XTXH silicon") cards, though a significant upgrade from the air-cooled card. Coreteks in a recent report stated that the liquid-cooled reference RX 6900 XT is being targeted exclusively at the SI (system integrator) market, and so far, the card has only been spotted in China.

The launch of AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards on November 18 will end NVIDIA's monopoly on real-time raytracing. For the first time, gamers will have a choice of GPU vendors when buying a raytracing-capable graphics card. Today, we're releasing a new 3DMark feature test that measures pure raytracing performance. You can use the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test to compare the performance of the dedicated raytracing hardware in the latest graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA.

Real-time raytracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that's optimized for raytracing operations. Despite the advances in GPU performance, the demands are still too high for a game to rely on raytracing alone. That's why games use raytracing to complement traditional rendering techniques. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test is designed to make raytracing performance the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass.DOWNLOAD: 3DMark v2.15.7078

[Update, September 29, 2020: We now have a good first look at the card courtesy the man himself. It confirms what we already knew, with a 360 mm AIO cooler and a flip-up OLED screen paired to the flagship offering from EVGA this generation.]

It's only been moments after the RTX 3090's release, but professional overclockers are already unleashing the power available on NVIDIA's GA-102 chip by resorting to exotic cooling techniques. Renowned overclocker Vince "K|NGP|N" Lucido, who works in close proximity with NVIDIA AIB EVGA, tamed the RTX 3090's temperature by resorting to liquid nitrogen. This, alongside tweaks to Vcore (1069 mV) allowed the card to reach a startling 2.58 GHz core clock (a staggering 52.2% increase over NVIDIA's base clock), and 10.750 MHz (21.5 Gbps) memory clocks on the GDDR6X subsystem, which in itself is a 10.3% increase over reference clocks.

The 16.673 3D Mark Port Royal score was achieved with a fully custom design made by EVGA with Vince Lucidos' input. This über 3090 ultimately delivered a performance increase of around 30% more than the stock RTX 3090 would be able to, which isn't a bad equilibrium between the core and memory clock increases. Some might say this is the performance delta one would expect between the 3090 and the 3080 (an overall 40% performance increase, considering the 3090 is already an average of 10% faster than the 3080 at stock clocks).

NVIDIA today announced that it is extending DXR (DirectX Raytracing) support to several GeForce GTX graphics models beyond its GeForce RTX series. These include the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060 6 GB. The GTX 1060 3 GB and lower "Pascal" models don't support DXR, nor do older generations of NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA has implemented real-time raytracing on GPUs without specialized components such as RT cores or tensor cores, by essentially implementing the rendering path through shaders, in this case, CUDA cores. DXR support will be added through a new GeForce graphics driver later today.

The GPU's CUDA cores now have to calculate BVR, intersection, reflection, and refraction. The GTX 16-series chips have an edge over "Pascal" despite lacking RT cores, as the "Turing" CUDA cores support concurrent INT and FP execution, allowing more work to be done per clock. NVIDIA in a detailed presentation listed out the kinds of real-time ray-tracing effects available by the DXR API, namely reflections, shadows, advanced reflections and shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination (unbaked), and combinations of these. The company put out detailed performance numbers for a selection of GTX 10-series and GTX 16-series GPUs, and compared them to RTX 20-series SKUs that have specialized hardware for DXR.Update: Article updated with additional test data from NVIDIA.

NVIDIA had their customary GTC keynote ending mere minutes ago, and it was one of the longer keynotes clocking in at nearly three hours in length. There were some fascinating demos and features shown off, especially in the realm of robotics and machine learning, as well as new hardware as it pertains to AI and cars with the all-new Jetson Nano. It would be fair to say, however, that the vast majority of the keynote was targeting developers and researchers, as usually is the case at GTC. However, something came up in between which caught us by surprise, and no doubt is a pleasant update to most of us here on TechPowerUp.

Following AMD's claims on software-based real-time ray tracing in games, and Crytek's Neon Noir real-time ray tracing demo for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, it makes sense in hindsight that NVIDIA would allow rudimentary DXR ray tracing support to older hardware that do not support RT cores. In particular, an upcoming drivers update next month will allow DXR support for 10-series Pascal-microarchitecture graphics cards (GTX 1060 6 GB and higher), as well as the newly announced GTX 16-series Turing-microarchitecture GPUs (GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti). The announcement comes with a caveat letting people know to not expect RTX support (think lower number of ray traces, and possibly no secondary/tertiary effects), and this DXR mode will only be supported in Unity and Unreal game engines for now. More to come, with details past the break.

Did you see the NVIDIA keynote presentation at CES this year? For us, one of the highlights was the DLSS demo based on our 3DMark Port Royal ray tracing benchmark. Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've added this exciting new graphics technology to 3DMark in the form of a new NVIDIA DLSS feature test. This new test is available now in 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions.

3DMark feature tests are specialized tests for specific technologies. The NVIDIA DLSS feature test helps you compare performance and image quality with and without DLSS processing. The test is based on the 3DMark Port Royal ray tracing benchmark. Like many games, Port Royal uses Temporal Anti-Aliasing. TAA is a popular, state-of-the-art technique, but it can result in blurring and the loss of fine detail. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an NVIDIA RTX technology that uses deep learning and AI to improve game performance while maintaining visual quality.

UL Benchmarks released more information on pricing and availability of its upcoming addition to the 3DMark benchmark suite, named "Port Royal." The company revealed that the benchmark will officially launch on January 8, 2019. The Port Royal upgrade will cost existing 3DMark paid (Advanced and Professional) users USD $2.99. 3DMark Advanced purchased from January 8th onward at $29.99 will include Port Royal. 3DMark Port Royal is an extreme-segment 3D graphics benchmark leveraging DirectX 12 and DirectX Raytracing (DXR). UL Benchmarks stated that Port Royal was developed with inputs from industry giants including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Microsoft.

Port Royal is the name of the latest component of UL Benchmarks 3DMark. Designed to take advantage of the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, this benchmark features an extreme poly-count test-scene with real-time ray-traced elements. Screengrabs of the benchmark depict spacecraft entering and leaving mirrored spheres suspended within a planet's atmosphere, which appear to be docks. It's also a shout out to of a number of space-sims such as "Star Citizen," which could up their production in the future by introducing ray-tracing. The benchmark will debut at the GALAX GOC Grand Final on December 8, where the first public run will be powered by a GALAX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti HOF graphics card. It will start selling in January 2019.