NukeMark GPU Stress Test Promises to Drop NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 to 15 FPS in Early Access Launch

EzBench, a Norway-based benchmarking studio, has released NukeMark into Early Access on Steam. Built entirely in Unreal Engine 5.7, NukeMark is a commercial GPU benchmark and stress test designed to push modern graphics cards past the limits of any workload a shipping game would realistically demand.

Unlike the synthetic “power-virus” loops and single-component testers reviewers have relied on for years, NukeMark is adversarial by design. It drives Nanite virtualized geometry, the MegaLights many-light system, Lumen global illumination and reflections with hardware ray tracing, and 8K virtual textures all at once, deliberately exceeding any performance budget a shipping title would respect. In its flagship scene, the render load holds NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 to roughly 15-20 frames per second at native 4K resolution, with no upscaling applied.

Why EzBench Built It

According to EzBench, existing GPU validation tools were built for a pre-ray-tracing era. Modern cards constantly juggle clocks, voltages, and temperatures, and a card that clears a rasterized synthetic benchmark can still fail once ray tracing enters the pipeline. NukeMark targets that gap specifically: a real, ray-traced, modern-engine load pushed to the breaking point, rather than a synthetic approximation.

“We’re not trying to replace a CPU torture test or a memory validator. We built the missing piece: a real-engine, ray-traced load that finds the GPU’s ceiling. And we publish honest leaderboards, native and upscaled never share a board,” said Ezekiel Hauge of EzBench.

Two Scenes, Two Failure Modes

• Emberhold: Buries hardware under hundreds of demanding lights and shadows simultaneously, the scene responsible for the 15-20 FPS RTX 5090 result at 4K.
• Pandora: Shifts the attack to memory, consuming 12-15 GB or more of VRAM at 4K to expose capacity ceilings before raw compute runs out.

What’s New in NukeMark

• Real production engine: Runs on Unreal Engine 5.7, driving Nanite, MegaLights, Lumen hardware ray tracing, and 8K virtual textures simultaneously, the simultaneity itself being the stress vector.
• Adversarial by design: Every scene is authored to overload the GPU with zero concessions to a performance budget, rather than modeling a representative game.
• Exposes the ray-tracing blind spot: Lumen hardware ray tracing builds and traverses a BVH over dense Nanite geometry, a path rasterized synthetic tests never touch and where overclocks commonly fail.
• Leaderboards without an asterisk: Native and upscaled runs are kept as separate, distinctly named scenes so a DLSS-assisted result is never ranked against a native one.
• Benchmark scores with traveling context: NukeMark indexes a machine’s hardware performance, stability, and output into scaling scores that carry continuity between tests.

EzBench positions NukeMark as a complement to existing benchmarking suites rather than a replacement, intended to slot in alongside established CPU and memory tools while covering the GPU and modern render pipeline specifically.

About EzBench

EzBench (Ezbench Solutions AS), based in Notodden, Telemark, Norway, develops benchmarking and performance-analysis tools for gamers and esports players. NukeMark is the company’s flagship application.