This new Raymarching benchmark will bring your RTX 5090 to its knees: 1080p at just 2-3FPS

The new Radiance DX12 GPU benchmark uses Raymarching, relies on FP32 compute, shows potential of current and future graphics cards.

This new Raymarching benchmark will bring your RTX 5090 to its knees: 1080p at just 2-3FPS
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Gaming Editor
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1 minute & 45 seconds read time
TL;DR: Radiance is a new DX12 raymarching benchmark that stresses GPU FP32 compute performance using pure mathematical geometry without textures or shortcuts. Even the powerful GeForce RTX 5090 struggles at 1080p, highlighting next-gen hardware demands and offering a cutting-edge GPU stress test for advanced lighting simulations.

If you want a new benchmark to bring your expensive GeForce RTX 5090 to its knees, then check out Radiance, a new Raymarching benchmark that even at 1080p, the RTX 5090 can only spit out 2-3FPS.

This new Raymarching benchmark will bring your RTX 5090 to its knees: 1080p at just 2-3FPS 53
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The new Radiance benchmark was built by former Tom's Hardware and Thresh's FiringSquad writer, Alan Dong, with Radiance using the DX12 API and analyzing FP32 compute performance from your GPU by running a "raymarched" version of breakout. You can download Radiance: A Raymarching Benchmark right here.

The benchmark solely relies on raymarched geometry, with no texture maps, no shortcuts, no pre-baked illumination, this is all pure mathematics that your GPU needs to crunch. There are a few resolutions to choose from: 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, and 4K with varying levels of debris count: no debris, 80 debris, 160 debris, 320 debris, and finally, 640 debris.

There are a couple of presets: RTX 5090 (720p with 80 debris) and Extreme (1080p with 640 debris), while the Radiance benchmark itself only weighs 80KB compressed, which is astonishing in this day and age. There are no VRAM bandwidth tests, or anything like RT (ray tracing) or AI-enhanced anything here. Ray Marching is mostly used in physics simulations as an alternative to ray tracing.

Radiance: A Raymarching Benchmark: The same Breakout geometry - bricks, paddle, ball - rendered through pure mathematics. Raymarching calculates the path of every photon, simulating light as it truly behaves. Signed distance functions define surfaces. Global illumination fills the space. Shadows fall where physics dictates they must.

This is our creative vision for what these games could become: the timeless mechanics we've refined, expressed through computational light. The same heritage, the same precision, but rendered with techniques that push current hardware to its absolute limits.

The vision currently exceeds the technology. Radiance requires an RTX 5090 to achieve playable framerates with advanced lighting - and that's with the debris system disabled. Full visual fidelity awaits hardware perhaps a generation away. We release it now as a benchmark: a way to stress-test today's GPUs, and a glimpse of where we're headed.