FurMark is a notorious benchmark, aptly named a “power virus” by some hardware manufacturers, it really is a hardware killer at times. It’s by far the most intensive stress test for a graphics card, but if you want to really stress those thermals and power draw limits, it’s really a potent tool for testing the limits. However, what’s surprising is that the software hasn’t had a major update since 2007, that is of course until now.
FurMark 2
The latest update will take FurMark from version 1.x to version 2.x, its first major update in 16 years! Honestly, I know I’ve been doing this job a long time, but it never crossed my mind just how old that software has become.
Unfortunately, there are no official release notes for the beta release, but we hear that it will soon exit beta testing and be ready for the masses… well, the masses of people who brutally stress graphics cards on a regular basis, at least.
What’s New?
According to TomsHardware.com, the update has got some obvious changes. The UI is now very different, and suitably more presentable and modern as you might expect. There’s also a live GPU temperature and usage chart integrated into the software, and you can now switch between FurMark Gl and FurMark VK, which use the OpenGL and Vulkan APIs respectively. There are links in the front end to quickly download GPU Shark, GPU-Z and CPU Burner so you can test other aspects of your system performance.
Keep in mind, that while there are already quite a lot of results posted in their online database, these results are not comparable with previous versions of the software, so you may need to re-test your other hardware to make a fair comparison.
How to Download
If you want to grab the new beta version of FurMark 2, you can hit up the Geeks3D Discord Server here. If you want to share your results, hit us up on our Discord server here, we’d love to see that!
