THROWING SHADE

There’s some benchmarking software you may have heard of called 3DMark. It’s on Steam. Recently, it updated its benchmarks to include the 3DMark Mesh Shader Feature Test, which requires a GPU that’s compatible with DirectX 12 Ultimate. The test runs twice, once with mesh shaders disabled, then again with them switched on. In 4K, using an RTX 3080 card, we got a framerate of around 50 fps for the first run, then something closer to 500 fps for the second, with no perceivable difference in what was displayed on the screen. How the heck did that happen?

‘Shaders’ is a term that’s been thrown around