GravityMark 1.44 Released With Ray-Tracing Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Vulkan on 16 January 2022 at 05:57 AM EST. 24 Comments
VULKAN
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.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week