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I tried the ‘stress test your GPU hopes you never run’ and it made my main gaming rig look like a chump
PC Gamer tested Nukemark, an early-access Unreal Engine 5.7 benchmarking tool designed to push modern graphics cards beyond typical gaming workloads. On the writer’s RTX 4070 Super gaming PC, both tests ran at very low frame rates even at 1080p and 1440p, illustrating how demanding the software is rather than indicating ordinary games will perform similarly.
The system used an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5 memory and an RTX 4070 Super. Its best result was 23fps in the Pandora test at 1080p, while 1440p results fell to 12–13fps; enabling DLSS unexpectedly reduced performance to 5–6fps at 1440p. Nukemark uses Nanite, MegaLights, hardware ray tracing and virtual textures up to 8K, and its developer says even an RTX 5090 achieves roughly 15–20fps at native resolution.
In short
- Nukemark overwhelmed an RTX 4070 Super at all tested settings.
- The benchmark is intentionally harsher than modern games.
- DLSS produced unexpectedly worse results in this early-access test.
Explained simply
A graphics card renders the images you see in games, and benchmarks are tools that measure how well a system handles a particular workload. Nukemark is an early-access test built with Unreal Engine 5.7, a game-making tool, and is designed to push graphics hardware much harder than most games do.
The test uses demanding features such as detailed virtual textures, complex lighting and ray tracing, which simulates how light reflects around a scene. Its developer says even Nvidia’s high-end RTX 5090 runs it at only around 15 to 20 frames per second at native resolution.
That makes Nukemark a measure of performance under an unusually heavy load, rather than a guide to how a graphics card will run ordinary games. Results can also depend on the test’s settings and how well features such as upscaling work with the software.