Futuremark has taken note of the recent GPU and CPU launches and responded with finally bringing their updated Time Spy Extreme 4k DX12 test to the public on October 11 this year so you can pound your hardware as well. We've got an early look at the new update to the test and wanted to share the updated features. We will also be looking at early performance on today's drivers. Just in case anyone is curious, this will be a FREE update for existing Advanced and Professional license. But only if purchased after July 14, 2016 otherwise it can be added with the Time Spy Upgrade.

What's Updated

The Graphics portion of the test is a more stressful version of the Time Spy benchmark by cranking the resolution up from 1440p to 4K. The CPU portion has seen the biggest overhaul and is completely different to take advantage of newer multi-core CPUs from Intel and AMD.

In 2017, both AMD and Intel introduced new processors with more cores than

had ever been seen in a consumer-level CPU before.

The Time Spy CPU test does not scale well on processors with 10 or more

threads. It simply doesn’t have enough workload for the large-scale

parallelization that high-end CPUs provide. A new test is needed.

Enhanced test design

The Time Spy Extreme CPU test also features a combination of physics

computations and custom simulations, but it is three times more demanding

than the Time Spy CPU test.

Adding more simulation requires more visualization, however, which can make

rendering the bottleneck in some cases. This issue was solved by changing the

metric for the test.

Instead of calculating the time taken to execute an entire frame, in the

Extreme CPU test we only measure the time taken to complete the simulation

work. The rendering work in each frame is done before the simulation and

doesn’t affect the score.

The test metric is average simulation time per frame reported in milliseconds.

Unlike frame rate, with this metric a lower number means better performance.

-3DMark Technical Guide

Test System and Results

The bulk of the GPU testing was done on our X370 Test Bench, we found no more than 1% variance between the Graphics Scores or the CPU Score regardless of CPU and GPU configuration. We have included the specifications of the X99 Test Bench as well since it was used to pull a CPU comparison. In addition to just the scores we also included charts showing the frames per second for each of the two runs.

X370 Test Bench

X99 Test System