If you'd like to test the OpenGL capabilities of your rig or simply want to find something new to be wow'ed by in the way of pretty graphics and lighting effects, download this new benchmark tool dubbed "Lightsmark".

Unlike 3DMark which can be quite taxing on system components (particularly the graphics card) this one is quite a bit more forgiving thanks to the efficiency of the OpenGL 2.0 API.

Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn't add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?

You can download the 29MB installer from the homepage here or over at Guru3D folks.