The big stress for new GPU architectures and the latest and greatest graphics cards, like NVIDIA's fresh GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega - are the new APIs in Vulkan and DirectX 12. Futuremark has just announced that there is a new API Overhead test that replaces Mantle with Vulkan - with the API Overhead feature test running DX11, DX12, and Vulkan.
Futuremark explains in its press release: "The 3DMark API Overhead feature test measures API performance by making a steadily increasing number of draw calls. The result of the test is the number of draw calls per second achieved by each API before the frame rate drops below 30 FPS. The purpose of the test is to compare the relative performance of different APIs on a single system. The API Overhead feature test is not a general-purpose GPU benchmark, and it should not be used to compare graphics cards from different vendors. For more details, please read the 3DMark Technical Guide".
The new API Overheard test is available for 3DMark Advanced and Professional Edition, with the standalone versions of 3DMark requiring a manual update. The Steam versions will update automatically, just like my test beds all have - but the new API Overhead test is not available for the 3DMark Basic Edition, or the Steam demo.
Expect a full run of this next week on all of our GPUs.