Futuremark Looks To The Past And Future With New Time Spy Benchmark

Futuremark has just released a brand-new update to its ultra-popular 3DMark benchmark which introduces ‘Time Spy’, a test that looks to the past and future.

One goal of Time Spy is to make people feel a little nostalgic, as there are a number of different cues in the benchmark that act as throwbacks to previous 3DMark versions. As I’ve run each version of 3DMark hundreds of times, certain aspects of the test did bring a smile to my face.

Futuremark doesn’t give us a list of which throwbacks are included, but there are some I can’t remember too well (somehow) and others I wish were present. One example would be with 3DMark 2001; the nature scene in that demo always stuck with me for being so damn awesome. At the time, it was literally jaw-dropping – it’s hard to believe that version’s release was fifteen years ago now!

Oh well – there’s more to Time Spy than just nostalgia. This is a DirectX 12-exclusive benchmark, and includes support for multi-threading, explicit multi-adapter, and, as you’d expect, asynchronous compute.

It’s good to have a DirectX 12 benchmark from Futuremark, and we’ll work to implement it into our testing as soon as we can. If you want to give Time Spy a go yourself, you’ll need to own the full version of 3DMark and then shell out $10, or 50% less if you act fast.