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3DMark’s ray-tracing benchmark finally has a name. First announced back in September, albeit without a name to it, the new benchmark was built to measure real-time ray-tracing performance in graphics cards that support Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR).
Port Royal is the first dedicated benchmark of its kind for gamers, and it’ll arrive on 3DMark on 8 January next year. It won’t be built into the Basic Edition though, and only those who pay for 3DMark Advanced Edition or Professional Edition will be able to run it.
NVIDIA put ray-tracing front and center with its new GeForce RTX 20-series cards, but it’ll still be sometime before we see anything approaching widespread adoption on the part of game developers.
Still, real-time ray-tracing promises new levels of realism for PC graphics, and Port Royal leverages DXR to enhance reflections, shadows, and other effects that are more difficult to achieve using traditional rendering techniques.
Port Royal also serves as an example of what games with ray-tracing enabled might look like. The benchmark runs at a 2,560 x 1,440-pixel resolution and was developed with input from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Microsoft.
The only cards that can take advantage of Port Royal right now are NVIDIA’s Turing GPUs, but that should improve with time as more cards get DXR support moving forward.
Read next:
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti review
- What you need to know about ray tracing and NVIDIA's Turing architecture
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