3D Mark has released a brand new benchmarking test for the latest generation of graphics cards, something that has been needed since the release of the RTX 3080 last year, and it seems that Nvidia still has the lead over AMD in terms of performance, at least in this particular case.

The new 3DMark benchmark has support for the latest DirectX 12 Ultimate features and capabilities of the RTX 30 series and AMD Big Navi GPUs. DX12 Ultimate features some interesting new tech such as Mesh Shaders, that allow developers to improve performance with a new method of culling polygons that are off-screen. It has the potential to significantly improve the performance of games in the future.

In fact, it's potentially able to improve frame rates by up to 8x if implemented correctly and does not have any detrimental effect on the image that is seen by players. The new benchmark focuses on this tech, which shows huge performance jumps with mesh shaders on vs. off. In fact, on the RTX 3080, the average frame rate in the benchmark without mesh shaders is 67.32FPS, without it, it's a staggering 584.09FPS.

It sounds too good to be true, but the performance boost does appear to be significant. The downside is if you're on Team AMD, that boost isn't going to be as big as that seen by Nvidia cards. In the same test, the RX 6800 XT managed just 28.09FPS without mesh shaders, and 468.77FPS with it enabled - still a huge jump, but much lower than the 3080's average frame rate.

The performance difference on AMD is higher though, with more than 1,500% improvement compared to 767% on Nvidia's card. So while Nvidia has a clear lead over AMD here, on the whole, this technology seems to be a win for everyone.