After many months of having no standardised benchmark to evaluate ray-tracing capabilities of the new NVIDIA GPUs, we now have a contender in the form of 3DMark Port Royal by UL Benchmarks. Port Royal was developed with inputs from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and Microsoft. The benchmark can be used for any hardware that supports the Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR) technology which was introduced to the latest version of DirectX 12. Port Royal also supports multi-GPU configurations out of the box and is available as a $2.99 upgrade to existing 3DMark Advanced licenses.
The 3DMark Port Royal benchmark uses DXR to enhance reflections, shadows and other effects that highlight ray-tracing features. As per UL Benchmarks, “3DMark Port Royal is a realistic and practical example of what to expect from ray tracing in upcoming games—ray tracing effects running in real-time at reasonable frame rates at 2560 × 1440 resolution.”
Port Royal will run on any hardware that supports ray tracing, which is practically everything since ray tracing has been around for some time. However, only the NVIDIA GPUs have hardware acceleration for the same. Currently, games such as Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus, etc support DXR and in total, there are about 21 games releasing in the near future with support for DXR.