The market is full of benchmarks that let you visualize the performance and stability of your hardware, but in most cases you have to download huge packages, especially when they are aimed at graphics cards. GravityMark is an exception to the rule: its installation takes up less than 250 MB on disk and it uses your web browser to present its interface. At the same time, it lets you test the most important APIs on the market and apply new technologies such as ray tracing in every session.
Despite its age, many YouTubers and hardware experts still favor Unigine Heaven (it turns 13 in October) to test the stability of their graphics cards. The reasons are simple: it is a lightweight, flexible, free, easy-to-configure benchmark that puts enough pressure on the hardware to detect errors quickly.
The question is whether there are other benchmarks with a similar profile. 3DMark demands 9 GB for a standard installation, and Unigine's own Superposition jumps to 5 GB, with a 1.2 GB installer. However, today we came across GravityMark, recently updated to version 1.71. GravityMark is as light as Heaven, but includes support for the most modern APIs and several additional tweaks worth exploring.
How to test your GPU with GravityMark
The first striking aspect of GravityMark is that it doesn't load its own interface; instead, it works over the web browser configured by default, using a localhost address. There we find four different API values (Direct3D11, Direct3D12, Vulkan and OpenGL), four rendering modes for asteroids and shadows (hardware, compute rasterization, mesh shaders and ray tracing), an antialiasing switch, and buttons that help us define the data that appears in the benchmark (FPS, sensors and general information).
Two values that can completely change the performance of our hardware are the number of asteroids (200,000 by default) and the LOD bias, with a maximum value of +6. The rest of the options let us change the screen mode (fullscreen, fulldesktop and windowed), force the benchmark to run on a specific monitor, and of course configure the resolution. The presets range from 720p to 8k, but the Custom value helps us apply alternative resolutions.
Finally, the GravityMark interface has shortcuts to its manual, the results list, and the leaderboard published on the Web, while Demo mode is very useful if we want to ignore the score aspect and leave the benchmark running in a loop. GravityMark is free, and is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android.
Official site and download: Click here
