I tried the 'stress test your GPU hopes you never run' and it made my main gaming rig look like a chump

It might sound like a cruel joke in a time where memory is costing hundreds of dollars more than it used to, and GPUs are getting price hikes, but there's a new bit of software called Nukemark that is designed to bring even the best graphics cards to their absolute limits.

Nukemark is based in Unreal Engine 5.7 with Nanite, MegaLights, and its Lumen hardware ray tracing going as hard as they can with up to 8K virtual textures. The RTX 5090 reportedly only gets 15-20 average fps at native resolution, and developer Ezbench seems proud of that.

Even the trailer on the Steam page calls it the "stress test your GPU hopes you never run". Not one to back down to trailer marketing, I've decided to boot it up on my humble rig and put it through its paces.

My rig is equipped with an RTX 4070 Super, matched with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and 32 GB of DDR5. It's no slouch in the gaming department, and I rarely have problems running new games on it. I can often play games natively without upscaling or frame generation and get a solid experience. At 1440p, both of Nukemark's tests looked like a slideshow. You can see my results below.

Nukemark results with an RTX 4070 Super

1080p

1440p

1080p (DLSS)

1440p (DLSS)

Pandora average fps (Test 1)

23

13

22

6

Emberhold average fps (Test 2)

19

12

18

5

Weirdly, the DLSS option seemed to make the tests perform worse, and I'm not too sure why. It could be some sort of bottleneck in my specific rig, or merely a software issue. Nukemark is an early access piece of software, which is expected to take 12-18 months to launch fully, so some hitches are perhaps to be expected.

I couldn't test the game at 4K as my max resolution at home is 1440p, but none of the tests ended with a result I would call 'playable'. In the best-case scenario (1080p on Pandora), an average of 23 fps looked so choppy that, if it were a game, I'd be asking for a refund already.

I suspect that when Nukemark says the RTX 5090 "sustains only approximately 15–20 FPS at native resolution", that native resolution is 4K. The two tests are full of the kinds of braggadocious visuals you would expect from stress-testing software. Emberhold, in particular, is drenched in lighting from magic, lava, and good 'ol ambience. It is littered with reflectable surfaces and fire. And, importantly, you are unlikely to get a 'playable' fps out of anything but the cream of the crop hardware right now.

So what's the point in Nukemark? Well, Ezbench Solutions says it's for system builders, overclockers, and gamers, but my gut says it's more for ego and for the curious. Nukemark rightly claims "Every scene is built to overload today's fastest GPUs" and it is "intentionally engineered to exceed the performance budgets of modern games."

So, in a sense, I suspect it will make for a better benchmark in the future. When some lucky gamer with far too much disposable income gets themselves an RTX 6090 and the 8 GB of memory they can afford from the leftover budget, they could be throwing it at Nukemark just to prove how powerful the next generation of cards is. My humble RTX 4070 Super and I, though, are just fine running the current crop of modern games at around 60 fps.