It’s easy to overlook how far AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce graphics cards have come over the last decade. This growth is something few will experience for themselves, given most upgrade their systems every other generation. Now, as UL Solutions slowly but surely retires 3DMark Time Spy, the company has shared benchmark data starting from 2016 that provides an illuminating perspective on the growth of GPU performance.
Time Spy should be a name familiar to owners of the best graphics cards and paltry pixel pushers alike. You’ll find results for it in all of our CPU and GPU reviews, and it’s typically one of the first things I run whenever I upgrade my personal rig. In fact, I remember running it on my Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 back in 2016. Even with that experience though, it boggles my mind to see how average scores have changed these past years, and just how frequently people run Time Spy.
In celebration of its new 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark, UL Solutions has put together a line graph illustrating how Time Spy scores have changed. The company claims this data is based on close to a staggering 48 million tests. Following some quick maths, that’s over 16,000 runs a day for the past eight years. The mind boggling metrics keep on coming, though, as the results show average GPU performance has quadrupled. 400%. 4x. It’s a lot.
Now, it’s important to note that these results are, of course, relative While the demands of Time Spy have remained static, the strain a GPU faces from modern games is decidedly greater compared to one from 2016. As UL Solutions rightly highlights, “Time Spy was starting to show its age”, hence the need for a replacement in the form of Steel Nomad.
Even with this caveat, though, it’s awesome to see such a sizeable rise in average scores over the years. Now with new GPU architectures from both Nvidia and AMD expected imminently, my appetite for even higher levels of performance is decidedly kindled. Give our GeForce RTX 4090 review to learn more about the top dog on the scene right now. That’s not forgetting our Radeon RX 7900 XTX review either, for the full picture.