NukeMark, a commercial GPU benchmark and stress test software by EzBench, built in Unreal Engine 5.7 and engineered to be the most demanding stress test ever run inside a real game engine, is now available in Early Access on Steam.
Unlike the synthetic “power-virus” loops and single-component testers reviewers have relied on for years, NukeMark is adversarial by design: it drives the heaviest features of a modern production engine, all at once, and deliberately past any budget a shipping game would respect. In its flagship scene, the initial render load is enough to hold NVIDIA’s flagship RTX 5090 to roughly 15-20 frames per second at 4K resolution, with no upscaling.
The tools people trust to validate a graphics card were built for a world before ray tracing. Modern GPUs constantly juggle clocks, voltages and temperatures, and a card that sails through a rasterised synthetic can crash the moment ray tracing enters the pipeline. NukeMark is built to be that missing workload which is a real, ray-traced, modern-engine load pushed to the breaking point.
What’s new in NukeMark
- A real production engine, not a synthetic loop: NukeMark runs on Unreal Engine 5.7 and drives Nanite virtualised geometry, the MegaLights many-light system, Lumen global illumination and reflections with hardware ray tracing, and 8K virtual textures, simultaneously. The simultaneity is the stress vector.
- Adversarial by design: Rather than try to model a representative game, every scene is authored to overload the GPU by design, with zero concessions to a performance budget. A card that survives NukeMark has margin everywhere else.
- It exposes the ray-tracing blind spot: Lumen hardware RT builds and traverses a BVH over dense Nanite geometry, the exact path rasterised synthetics never touch, and where most overclocks tend to fail.
- Two scenes, two failure modes: Emberhold buries hardware under hundreds of demanding lights and shadows (the 15-20 FPS RTX 5090 result); Pandora shifts the attack to memory, consuming 12-15 GB+ of VRAM at 4K to expose capacity ceilings before raw compute gives out.
- Leaderboards without an asterisk: Native and upscaled runs are separate, distinctly named scenes, so a DLSS-assisted result is never ranked against a native one – removing the credibility problem that dogs benchmarks which allow upscaling.
- Benchmark Scores with Traveling Context: NukeMark indexes the machines hardware performance, stability, and output into scaling scores that carry continuity between tests.
- 8K textures by design: The texture set runs at 8K, and across near-entirely custom assets the resident working set is huge, the deliberate driver behind Pandora’s 12-15 GB+ VRAM load, which surfaces capacity limits before compute ones.
For reviewers and overclockers, NukeMark is designed to slot into an existing bench alongside not in place of established CPU and memory tools. It targets the GPU and the modern render pipeline specifically, the one area synthetic loads and component testers leave uncovered.
Availability
NukeMark is available now in Early Access on Steam. Review builds, the full technical white paper, reference results across current flagship GPUs, and high-resolution scene captures are available to press on request. The team welcomes independent verification of its published figures.
