EzBench released NukeMark, a new GPU stress test that forces graphics cards to run Unreal Engine 5.7 at their absolute limits. This tool matters because it strips away performance budgets to reveal where hardware actually breaks under heavy ray tracing and virtual geometry loads. Buyers and enthusiasts can use these results to gauge if their current or planned GPUs can handle the most demanding next-generation rendering features.
New Unreal Engine 5.7 stress test reveals extreme hardware limits
The benchmark targets the heaviest features in the Unreal Engine 5.7 pipeline simultaneously. It combines Nanite virtualized geometry, the MegaLights many-light system, hardware-accelerated Lumen ray tracing, and 8K virtual textures in a single pass. EzBench designed this adversarial approach to find the true ceiling of modern GPUs rather than measuring typical gaming performance.
NukeMark includes two distinct scenes to test different hardware bottlenecks. The Emberhold scene focuses on complex lighting and shadow calculations. The Pandora scene stresses VRAM capacity by reportedly consuming 12 to 15GB of memory at native 4K resolution. These scenes allow users to isolate specific weaknesses in their graphics cards.
EzBench tracks native and DLSS-upscaled scores on separate leaderboards to prevent unfair comparisons. This structure avoids ranking upscaled performance against native rendering results. Developer press materials claim the Nvidia RTX 5090 achieves only 15 to 20 frames per second at native 4K in the flagship scene. These figures come from the developer's press materials rather than independent testing so far.
Ezekiel Hauge stated that the team built a real-engine, ray-traced load to find the GPU's ceiling. We have been tracking NukeMark closely and covered related stress tests in our earlier article on Palworld Mod Adds Ray-Traced Lighting, But. The benchmark is now available on Steam for users who want to push their hardware to the limit.
NukeMark provides a standardized way to measure GPU performance under extreme Unreal Engine 5.7 conditions. Users can compare their cards against these adversarial benchmarks to understand real-world limits for heavy ray tracing and virtual textures.
Source: NotebookCheck
