3DMark releases Steel Nomad benchmark

Recently, 3DMark celebrated its 25th anniversary, a milestone marking years of steadfast service as the benchmarking tool of choice for CPUs, graphics cards, and SSDs. The DirectX 12 benchmark for graphics cards, Time Spy, has been a standard for seven years. Now, the 3DMark team plans to unveil its successor, “Steel Nomad,” a non-ray-tracing GPU performance benchmark.

The forthcoming Steel Nomad is set to be a cross-platform benchmarking tool supporting multiple APIs, including DirectX 12 for Windows, Metal for macOS and iOS, as well as Vulkan for Android and Linux systems. It remains unclear whether direct comparisons between the various APIs’ results will be feasible, as further details of the test have not been disclosed.

According to an email from the company to the media, Steel Nomad is poised to be the most demanding non-ray-tracing benchmark to date. So far, they have only released three screenshots of the benchmark, with the release date yet to be revealed.