Futuremark Releases 3DMark Fire Strike Stress Test

Futuremark has added a new test to its 3DMark software suite. This new test is called Fire Strike Stress Test. It will test the stability of the frame rate in a selected number of loops in the Fire Strike benchmark. This test or more or less a throttling test as the final score shows how stable the frame rate of the best run compared to the worst. The idea behind this test is to weed out graphics cards that throttle frequency once a certain temperature limit has been reached, thus lowering performance.

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This test will be available in the Advanced Edition and Professional Edition of 3DMark. The stress test will run for 20 loops over a 10-minute period in the Advanced Edition and up to 5000 loops in the Professional Edition. A “stable pass” is scoring 97% or higher. This requires that the frame rate of the worst loop is within three percent of the best loop. So if the card scores 100 FPS in its best loop it cannot score less than 97 FPS in the worst-performing loop. Three percent is a reasonable degree of variation.

The test monitors CPU frequency, GPU load, GPU and CPU temperature, and FPS.

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