GravityMark 1.44 Released With Ray-Tracing Support

Those wanting to enjoy some impressive Vulkan ray-traced visuals on Linux (and macOS or Windows) now have GravityMark to add to the list of Linux-native ray-traced software for testing.

GravityMark is the new graphics benchmark from Tellusim, the company led by Alexander Zapryagaev who was one of the original Unigine co-founders. GravityMark has been quite impressive for a free and cross-platform, cross-API benchmark while with this weekend's v1.44 release is even more impressive now that there is DirectX 12 / Vulkan / Metal ray-tracing support.

Ray-tracing support is the main addition with GravityMark 1.44. There can also now be up to four million asteroids rendered. Ray-tracing is used on the asteroids as well as shadows.

Though at the moment those wanting to enable the GravityMark ray-tracing will be best off with NVIDIA RTX hardware. Using the AMD Radeon Vulkan driver on Windows (or AMDGPU-PRO on Linux) will find color artifact issues and potential crashing. AMD has been made aware of the issue with earlier GravityMark builds but is not yet resolved. When I was trying GravityMark 1.44 on RADV with RADV_PERFTEST=rt, RADV doesn't yet work with the GravityMark ray-tracing implementation due to needing to support the Vulkan ray queries extension. So if wanting to use ray-tracing, you'll find the experience in good shape for NVIDIA with RTX GPUs but more painful elsewhere. At least GravityMark 1.44 can be run without ray-tracing as well.

This new release can be downloaded at gravitymark.tellusim.com. Our gravitymark test profile for the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org has already been updated against the new release. Look for GravityMark 1.44 in our upcoming Linux GPU/driver articles.