Nukemark is a GPU stress test that makes even an RTX 4070 Super look weak

A new GPU benchmark called Nukemark has arrived on Steam Early Access, and it's built specifically to destroy even the most powerful graphics cards on the market. Developer Ezbench Solutions built it on Unreal Engine 5.7, pushing Nanite, MegaLights, and Lumen hardware ray tracing to their limits with up to 8K virtual textures — and the RTX 5090 reportedly only averages 15–20 fps at native resolution. The Steam page trailer calls it the "stress test your GPU hopes you never run", and that's not just marketing.

PC Gamer ran it on a rig with an RTX 4070 Super, AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and 32 GB of DDR5 — a solid mid-to-high-end setup that handles most modern games without upscaling. At 1440p, both test scenes ran like slideshows. Nukemark has two scenes: Pandora and Emberhold. At 1080p, Pandora averaged 23 fps and Emberhold hit 19 fps. At 1440p, those numbers dropped to 13 and 12 fps respectively. Enabling DLSS made things worse rather than better — the tester suspects a bottleneck specific to that rig or an early software issue. The 4K results weren't tested since the rig maxes out at 1440p, but the assumption is that the RTX 5090's 15–20 fps figure refers to 4K native. Emberhold is particularly brutal — it's packed with lava, magic lighting, reflective surfaces, and ambient light sources designed to hammer ray tracing hardware.

Nukemark is currently in Early Access with a projected 12–18 month window before a full launch. Ezbench positions it for system builders, overclockers, and enthusiast gamers who want to push hardware to its absolute ceiling. The benchmark is intentionally engineered to exceed the performance budgets of modern games — it's not trying to simulate a real game workload, it's trying to find the breaking point of whatever GPU you throw at it. That makes it less useful as a day-to-day comparison tool right now and more of a forward-looking benchmark, the kind that will matter more once next-generation cards arrive and people want to prove just how much headroom they have.

For most gamers running anything below an RTX 5090, Nukemark is essentially a humility check. The RTX 4070 Super is a capable card that handles current games at 60 fps without issue — Nukemark just exists in a different league entirely. Whether that makes it a useful tool or an expensive ego trip probably depends on whether you're a hardware enthusiast or just someone who wants to play games.