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.
This is our first benchmark with this ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4060 OC Edition, and the least we can say is that we expected to see it a little higher up our ranking, even though we know that Fire Strike is more to the advantage of AMD cards.
Under Fire Strike Ultra, as was the case with the RTX 4060 Ti, the card struggles and even falls behind the RX 6600 XT.
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. The 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 outperforms the RX 7600, which should lead us to expect gaming performance close to that of the AMD model. We can see the Intel A750 ARC performing much better, but will it do the same in games?
Under 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 perform identically, and are both within striking distance of each other.
3DMark Speed Way
Ulbenchmark’s latest benchmark, and it’s nice to be able to say that we’re going to have a go at 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 ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4060 OC Edition scores 2591 points. We took the opportunity to run the old cards through the benchmark again, to make it more complete.
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 27.5 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 had 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 gains of between 30% and 35%.
3DMark DLSS Feature Test:
We didn’t keep this benchmark, since 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 ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4060 OC Edition achieves a score of 12.5 FPS without DLSS, then 38.1 FPS (201%) with DLSS 2 enabled. DLSS 3 still delivers a 73% gain over DLSS 2, so we can see just how much the arrival of DLSS 3 has boosted gaming performance.
Well, to conclude this first series of synthetic tests, we’re right on target with our performance expectations. We’re well ahead of the RTX 3060 and very close to the performance of the RX 7600. We should have very good 1080p performance in rasterization.
