3DMark's Time Spy successor, Steel Nomad, makes Nvidia's RTX 4090 work hard, without ray tracing

Steel Nomad, 3DMark's latest GPU benchmark, is the official successor of 3DMark popular Time Spy tool, which debuted eight years ago. PCGamesHardware benchmarked Steel Nomad and discovered it's a worthy successor to Time Spy, making even Nvidia's RTX 4090 struggle a bit.

Steel Nomad is explicitly designed to push the limits of the latest GPU hardware. 3DMark says that the newest generation of Nvidia and AMD GPU hardware is so fast that it has reached the limits of what Time Spy is capable of. Steel Nomad rectifies this issue by significantly increasing the GPU graphics workload.

The new benchmark comes in two formats: a vanilla Steel Nomad version and Steel Nomad Light, a much lighter counterpart aimed at lightweight devices with integrated graphics and smartphones. The hallmark of Steel Nomad is its rasterized-only graphics, which sets it apart from 3DMark's other ray-traced benchmarks like Speed Way. This makes it an excellent tool for comparing rasterized GPU performance, which is still a legitimate performance category, even as games continue to adopt ray-tracing graphics. Many modern games still forgo RT graphics, such as Sony's latest PC port, Horizon: Forbidden West .

The fully-fledged version of Steel Nomad utilizes a hefty 4K render resolution, combined with volumetric lighting, volumetric cloud calculations, and Intel's XeGTAO ambient occlusion. According to pictures, the world in Steel Nomad appears to be incredibly large, which will put even more stress on the GPU.

It might seem silly that Steel Nomad lacks ray-tracing capabilities, but that isn't the intended role of the new benchmark. Steel Nomad is explicitly designed to benchmark rasterized GPU performance, which is the same role that Time Spy fulfilled. 3DMark has other ray-tracing-specific benchmarks that address RT GPU performance benchmarking.

Performance

Steel Nomad does not disappoint in its ability to bring GPUs to their knees. PCGamesHardware recorded a maximum frame rate of just 112 on Nvidia's RTX 4090 flagship, with a manual overclock of 3GHz.

Lower-end GPUs of course do much worse: The Radeon RX 7900 XTX achieves just 73 FPS and Nvidia's RTX 4080 Super 72 FPS. Both Nvidia's RTX 4070 and AMD's RX 7800 XT achieve just 41 FPS, and both brands' lowest-end current-generation products, the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 , dip below 25 FPS on the benchmark.

The new Steel Nomad benchmark will officially be released tomorrow (May 21st) and will be available for free for all 3DMark users (it will be bundled in the free 3DMark Basic Edition).