3DMark Steel Nomad PC

Test your high-end gaming PC or Mac with Steel Nomad, a cross-platform benchmark that runs at 4K resolution via DirectX 12 on Windows. It showcases graphics techniques like volumetric skies, procedural grass, volume illumination, ambient occlusion, and depth-of-field in a sun-scorched setting, especially with HDR. Steel Nomad Light offers a 1440p version for lightweight systems, set at night over a flooded desert basin with toned-down effects. Run the Steel Nomad Stress Test for 20 minutes to check frame rate consistency, component frequencies, and temperatures during extended sessions. Use Explorer Mode to roam the scene, adjust graphics settings, tweak the camera for screenshots, or uncover hidden nods to past benchmarks. This free utility helps PC gamers spot performance throttling from issues like poor cooling.

This DLC is free for all owners of 3DMark and includes two benchmarks:

• Steel Nomad
  
• Steel Nomad Light

3DMark Steel Nomad is a cross-platform, non-raytraced benchmark for high-end gaming PCs and Macs. It uses the DirectX 12 API on Windows.
3DMark Steel Nomad Light is designed for lightweight PCs. It’s a lighter version of Steel Nomad, also using DirectX 12 on Windows.

Steel Nomad uses graphics technologies just like your favorite new game titles to give you a good idea of how your system will run the latest heavy PC games. Succeeding the massively popular 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, Steel Nomad runs at a 4k resolution and adds new graphics technologies like volumetric skies and procedural grass. New implementations of graphics techniques such as volume illumination, ambient occlusion, and depth-of-field makes the sun-scorched setting of Steel Nomad display some of the best PC benchmarking visuals to date, especially with HDR enabled.

Set at night, with the desert basin flooded by a vast lake, Steel Nomad Light is more accessible for lightweight and portable systems, lowering the resolution to 1440p and removing or reducing the most demanding graphical techniques used in Steel Nomad.

Steel Nomad Stress Test
The Steel Nomad stress test lets you easily find out how your PC’s gaming performance may change over longer gaming sessions. Stress tests run for 20 minutes to give time for a typical system’s component temperatures to stabilize. You’ll want to make sure your device hasn’t been running any benchmarks or games before you start the stress test to prevent heat from previous tasks affecting your run, though.

Stress tests give you a score for how consistent your frame rate was, and graphs showing how component frequencies and system temperatures changed during the test. Using these results can help identify whether your system performance is being throttled and help you identify potential causes such as inadequate cooling.

Explorer Mode
Explorer mode lets you freely explore the benchmark scene. Change benchmark graphics settings to find how different techniques affect visuals, tweak camera settings to create the perfect screenshot, or explore the scene to discover hidden secrets celebrating many of our benchmarks released over the last 25 years.