New Fire Strike Ultra benches systems at 4K Ultra HD resolutions, giving insight into whether a configuration is truly 4K capable.
New Fire Strike Ultra benches systems at 4K Ultra HD resolutions, giving insight into whether a configuration is truly 4K capable.
Ultra HD resolutions, known as 4K as they’re approximately four times the resolution of 1080p, are the next big thing in PC gaming. However it’s not always clear if your system is really capable of pushing this many pixels in-game. Today FutureMark are releasing a new 3DMark module specifically for the purpose, providing a one-stop shop for mainstream benchmarking and also catering to the ever increasing demands of the enthusiast.
Fire Strike Ultra, now part 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions, renders all test content at 3840 x 2160 before downscaling to your monitor’s display resolution. This allows you test out your system at 4K before investing in expensive new display hardware, but FutureMark do make pains to state that a GPU with at least 3GB dedicated GPU memory is required for the benchmark to run.
Custom resolutions have been a part of 3DMark for some time, but in Fire Strike Ultra a single 4K test with fixed criteria provides an ideal reference point for the comparison of two different systems. This differs from the plethora of informal custom 4K scores, where there is always some questionmark as to whether exactly the same settings were used.
Average amount of processing performed per frame
Even more so than the 1440p FireStrike Extreme test, FireStrike Ultra is an immensely resource intensive benchmark. Details can be found as a part of the 3DMark Technical Guide, whilst a leaderboard of results – from single-GPU all the way through to quad-SLI – has already started to form.
3DMark v1.4.775 is ready to download now. Standalone clients will prompt you to update to the latest version, whilst the Steam release should install automatically.
