Synthetic benchmarks:
Our first series of tests will be dedicated to synthetic benchmarks. These are often used for overclocking competitions, but are also very interesting for comparing different GPUs. We’ll be focusing on benchmarks from the 3DMark series.
We’ll be testing the following benchmarks:
- Fire Strike (1080p)
- Fire Strike Ultra (2160p)
- Time Spy (1440p)
- Time Spy Extreme (2160p)
- 3DMark Speed Way
- DirectX Raytracing
- Intel XeSS
- Mesh Shader
- 3DMark DLSS Feature Test (2160p)
3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Ultra:
Let’s start with 3DMark Fire Strike, one of today’s most widely used benchmarks. It consists of two graphics tests, a CPU test and a fourth test that combines GPU and CPU. Don’t forget to deactivate the demo, which makes no contribution to the final score and prolongs the benchmark’s duration (unnecessarily). The version used for these tests is, of course, the latest available.
This is the first benchmark we’ve carried out with this MSI RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Trio 8G, and the least we can say is that it’s right where we expected it to be, behind the RTX 3070 and ahead of the RTX 3060 Ti. The score here is 32210 points.
Under Fire Strike Ultra, we encountered a “problem” in that our score is lower than that of the RTX 3060 Ti. Despite several series of tests, this score does not vary. We’re going to find out what the problem is, as we’ve also encountered it with the Founders Edition.
3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme:
The second test is 3DMark Time Spy. Although this one is performed in 1440p, its main feature is that it uses DirectX 12. It consists of two graphics tests and a CPU test. As with Fire Strike, don’t forget to disable the demo. These first two benchmarks are provided by UL Benchmark.
The performance obtained in Time Spy is often representative of what we’ll get in games. Here, our sample of the day is on a par with the RTX 3070, which should lead us to expect gaming performance close to that of the RTX 3070.
Under 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, we achieved an excellent score of 6630 points, representing a 10% performance gain over the RTX 3060 Ti FE.
3DMark Speed Way
Ulbenchmark’s latest benchmark, and it’s nice to be able to say that we’re going to have a good time on this Speed Way. It uses DirectX 12 and defaults to 1440p. We haven’t modified anything, so we’re using the original benchmark.
Here too, our MSI RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Trio 8G scores 3245 points. When encoding our graphs, we realized that we were missing the results for the previous generation. We will update this graph in the coming hours.
3DMark DirectX Raytracing:
UL Benchmarks has added a new test to its series of benchmarks for measuring Ray Tracing performance. The idea is to use the 3DMark DirectX Ray Tracing test to compare the performance of Ray Tracing hardware dedicated to graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA, and now also from Intel!
The 3DMark DirectX Ray Tracing test is designed to make Ray Tracing the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the entire scene is traced and drawn in a single pass. The test result will depend entirely on Ray Tracing performance. This makes it easy to measure and compare the performance of different cards.
This benchmark has always been dominated by NVIDIA cards, and today’s sample is no exception, with a score of 38.8 FPS. It’s the addition of CUDA cores and higher frequencies that have a huge impact on the performance gain over the previous generation.
3DMark Intel XeSS
UL Benchmarks in collaboration with Intel will be adding this new benchmark to the 3DMark suite. We have been given early access to this new test for our tests. This Intel XeSS test is designed to evaluate and compare the performance and image quality of XeSS (Xe Super Sampling). There are four XeSS modes to choose from: Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced and Performance. The 3DMark inspection tool helps you compare image quality with a side-by-side view of XeSS rendering and native resolution rendering. You need a graphics card that supports Intel XeSS to run this test.
So we’ll have two scores, a number of FPS with XeSS disabled and then, on the right, with XeSS enabled. The mode chosen is “Ultra Quality”, which is actually the benchmark’s default mode.
In this new benchmark, all graphics cards without exception benefit from XeSS, but it’s Intel that reaps the greatest gain. ARC models see a gain of 50%, while NVIDIA and AMD models see a gain of between 30% and 35%.
3DMark DLSS Feature Test:
We didn’t keep this benchmark because it only concerns DLSS-compatible cards and was therefore not useful for our comparative tests. Here, we’ve retested it, since it officially supports DLSS 3 since the end of the NDA on the RTX 4090.
So we’re going to run a 2160p benchmark first with DLSS disabled, then with DLSS 2 performance and finally with DLSS 3 performance.
Our MSI RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Trio 8G achieves a score of 16.6 FPS without DLSS, then 47.5 FPS (+183%) with DLSS 2 enabled. DLSS 3 still delivers a 68% gain over DLSS 2, so we can see just how much the arrival of DLSS 3 has boosted gamingperformance.
Well, to conclude this first series of synthetic tests, we’re right in line with expected performance. We’re behind, but very close to, the RTX 3070, but with performance 8 to 11% higher than the RTX 3060 Ti. We should have excellent performance in 1080p and 1440p rasterization.
