The 3DMark Port Royal benchmark will be the first one dedicated to raytracing once it lands on January 8th, 2019.

　　However, during the recent GALAX GOC 2018 event in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, some of the most famous graphics card overclockers were already able to give it a try. The results have now been published on the dedicated 3DMark Port Royal Hall of Fame, giving us an outlook at what we can expect from the benchmark.

　　Swedish overclocker Tobias "Rauf" Bergström ranked first with a score of 11069, pulling well ahead of any competitor. He managed to average 51.25 FPS with a GALAX RTX 2080 Ti overclocked to 2.640 MHz (core clock) and 2.088 MHz (memory clock), thanks to liquid nitrogen. The PC configuration also included an Intel Core i9-9900K CPU, installed on an ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard.

　　Notably, the resolution is not included in the results. However, we can infer from the press release sent out by 3DMark that the benchmark was likely running at 1440p.

　　As mentioned above, the 3DMark Port Royale benchmark will be released on January 8th, 2019. 3DMark has announced the pricing as well. Upgrading will cost you $2.99 and it will only be available for the Advanced and Professional Edition of 3DMark, thus cutting out the Basic Edition and the Steam demo. From January 8th, 2019 onward, every purchase of the 3DMark Advanced Edition is going to include the Port Royal raytracing benchmark.

3DMark Port Royal, DirectX Raytracing benchmark

　　As well as benchmarking performance, 3DMark Port Royal is a realistic and practical example of what to expect from ray tracing in upcoming games— ray tracing effects running in real-time at reasonable frame rates at 2560 × 1440 resolution.

　　3DMark Port Royal was developed with input from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and other leading technology companies. We worked especially closely with Microsoft to create a first-class implementation of the DirectX Raytracing API.

　　Port Royal will run on any graphics card with drivers that support DirectX Raytracing. As with any new technology, there are limited options for early adopters, but more cards are expected to get DirectX Raytracing support in 2019.