3DMark Steel Nomad is now available to give your GPU an inferiority complex

I'd wager that nearly every enthusiast gamer has run 3DMark at some point. For years it's been the go-to benchmark for comparing GPUs whether on PCs, laptops, tablets or smartphones. It can be run on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.  

But no benchmark lasts forever, even if we do like to see bigger scores. Eventually, older 3DMark benchmarks become CPU-limited, making them irrelevant for their original purpose, which is to measure graphics performance.

It's roughly three times heavier for your PC than Time Spy

UL Solutions, the company behind the ever-popular 3DMark benchmarking software, has released an update called Steel Nomad. It's been designed to supersede the now aging Time Spy benchmark. It incorporates the latest graphical enhancements and it's roughly three times heavier for your PC than Time Spy. Even though it lacks ray tracing—you can use Speed Way or Port Royal for that—it's still a punishing 4K benchmark that's useful for measuring the relative performance of a wide variety of devices. It has an option to run in DirectX 12 or Vulkan mode, and most importantly it's a free update for owners of the 3DMark suite.

Steel Nomad has two versions. Aside from the standard version that's best suited for discrete graphics cards and gaming laptops, there's a light version, which is designed for devices with integrated graphics, as well as tablets and smartphones. It runs at 1440p and isn't as punishing as the standard version. Interestingly, there's no CPU test, and the single test is quite short at just under one minute.

As a graphics card reviewer and former overclocker, I've run 3DMark literally thousands of times, so any time a new benchmark arrives, I just know I'll end up using it a lot. My very first run was on my 24/7 daily Mini-ITX system, made up of an Intel Core i5 13600K, Asus ROG Strix Z790I WiFi, G.Skill DDR5-6400 32GB and an RTX 4060. The result was a score of 2,310 or 23.11 FPS. That was with a whole bunch of other apps running as well, so