New ray-tracing benchmark software Relic of Life released for free — see system requirements
See how you measure up.
Tony Wilson 
Image via Basemark
Benchmarking is a staple of gaming PCs. It’s how companies like Nvidia and AMD quantify the power of their new graphics cards. A new benchmark program from Finnish studio Basemark is all about testing your ray-tracing capabilities.
It’s called Relic of Life, and it’s totally free to download. Windows 10/11, Ubuntu, and Linux Flatpak versions are available on Basemark’s website. Relic of Life is meant for any device that utilizes ray-tracing and meets the system requirements (listed at the bottom of this article), including mobile devices to consoles, but if you’re grabbing the free version, you’ll most likely be doing so to test your PC gaming rig. Note that the free version requires you to be connected online and will automatically share your scores on Basemark’s Powerboard page — that’s the tradeoff for getting it at no cost.
Relic of Life will test your system with an array of technical features: ray-traced reflections with multiple bounces, ray-traced global illumination, physically based rendering, ground truth ambient occlusion, temporal anti-aliasing, volumetric lighting, and bone and vertex animations. If all the technical talk isn’t your thing, then you can at least enjoy watching the little robots run around a techno-organic world.
Relic of Life System Requirements
- Graphics card with ray-tracing support
- Graphics driver with DXR or Vulkan ray-tracing support
- Windows 10, Windows 11, or Linux operating system
- Processor utilizing x86_64 architecture
- 12 GB of RAM
- 6 GB of video RAM