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 to compare different GPUs. We will therefore focus on benchmarks from the 3DMark series.
We will test 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, which is one of the most used benchmarks today. 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 doesn’t add anything to the final score and prolongs the benchmark(unnecessarily). The version used for these tests is of course the latest one.
The first benchmark we run with this NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition and the least we can say is that it is actually where we expected it to be, behind the RTX 3070 and ahead of the RTX 3060 Ti. It scores 31885 points here.
Under Fire Strike Ultra, we encountered a “problem” as our score is lower than the RTX 3060 Ti. Despite several rounds of testing, this score does not vary. We will try to identify the problem.
3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme :
The second test is 3DMark Time Spy. Although this one is done in 1440p, it is especially special because 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 we get in Time Spy is often representative of what we will get in games. Here, our sample of the day is on par with the RTX 3070, which should give us an indication of gaming performance close to the RTX 3070.
Under 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, we get an excellent score of 6,594 points, which represents a performance gain of 9.6% compared to the RTX 3060 Ti FE.
3DMark Speed Way
This is the latest benchmark from Ulbenchmark 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 is by default in a 1440p definition. We have not modified anything and we use the original benchmark.
Here too our RTX 4060 Ti FE scores 3222 points. When encoding our graphs we realised that we were missing the results of the previous generation. We will update this graph in the next few hours.
3DMark DirectX Raytracing :
UL Benchmarks has added a new test to its series of benchmarks for measuring Ray Tracing performance. The idea will be to use the 3DMark DirectX Ray Tracing test to compare the performance of dedicated Ray Tracing hardware to graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA but now also 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 the performance of the Ray Tracing. This makes it easy to measure and compare the performance of different cards against each other.
This benchmark has always been dominated by NVIDIA cards and today’s sample is no exception with a score of 38 FPS. It is the addition of the CUDA cores and the increase in frequency that has a huge impact on the performance gain over the previous generation.
3DMark Intel XeSS
UL Benchmarks in collaboration with Intel will add this new benchmark to the 3DMark suite. We have been given early access to this new test for our testing. 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 FPS number with XeSS disabled and then, on the right, with XeSS enabled. The mode chosen is “Ultra Quality” which is actually the default mode for the benchmark.
In this new benchmark, all graphics cards without exception benefit from XeSS, but it is Intel that reaps the greatest gain. ARC models see a gain of 50%, while NVIDIA and AMD models see a gain of around 30-35%.
3DMark DLSS Feature Test:
We had not kept this benchmark since it only concerns DLSS compatible cards and was therefore not useful for our comparative tests. Here, we have 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 with DLSS disabled first, then with DLSS 2 performance and finally with DLSS 3 performance.
Our NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition scores 16.6 FPS without DLSS, then 47 FPS (+183%) with DLSS 2 enabled. DLSS 3 still provides a 68% gain over DLSS 2, so we can see how much of an improvement DLSS 3 has made in the gaming world
Well, as we conclude this first series of synthetic tests, we are right in the middle of the expected performance. We are behind, but very close to the RTX 3070 but with 8 to 10% better performance than the RTX 3060 Ti. We should have excellent performance in 1080p and 1440p in rasterization.
