Benchmarking one PC component against its competitors can be a tedious process. Finding out whether your new, expensive, hand-built gaming rig is performing just as it should is even more of a task, and that’s where 3DMark comes in. The new Time Spy Extreme test is made for 4K gaming PCs and uses DirectX 12 to see what your machine is truly capable of.
Time Spy Extreme is the first 4K DirectX 12 benchmark, but you don’t need a 4K monitor to run it; all you really need is a graphics card in your PC with at least 4GB of memory. What you actually want, though, is a graphics card from the upper end of Nvidia or AMD’s ranks, like a GeForce GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti — anything lesser might be a bit of a waste for 4K performance testing, which is punishing even on 2017’s most powerful GPUs.
The latest iteration of 3DMark’s high-end benchmark test also works better with multi-core CPUs; the CPU section of Time Spy Extreme is three times more demanding than the existing Time Spy, has been redesigned to work with CPUs with 8 cores and above like Intel’s 18-core Core i9.
If you’ve got a copy of 3DMark Advanced Edition or 3DMark Professional Edition already that was purchased within the last year, Time Spy Extreme will be a free upgrade — it’s out on October 11. [3DMark]
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