Espoo (Finland) - Even though Larrabee is at least a year and a half away from being available, FutureMark has released a benchmark that can tell whether Intel’s silicon can really compete against Nvidia and AMD in ... Ray-Tracing.

In its New Calico test (Graphics Test 2), 3DMarkVantage features a massive space battle - a scene that does not feature a single non-moveable object: Every object is in motion and is subject to local and global ray-tracing effects such as Parallax Occlusion Mapping, true impostors and volumetric fog.

If you pay attention to ships inside the demo, each and every one is ray-traced. Currently, it seems to us that Nvidia has the edge in ray-traced scenes over ATI. As it happens right now, the GeForce architecture is capable of handling ray tracing very well... after all, Nvidia owns Mental Images, the producer of the Mental Ray ray-tracer.

3DMarkVantage is suitable for all current and upcoming high-spec hardware and promises to squeeze every texel out of your graphics card and every hertz of out your CPU.