Want to know how capable your DirectX 11 video card is? Futuremark is releasing a new version of their 3DMark benchmarking tool to help you do exactly that.

Fire Strike is this year's real-time rendering test, optimized for DirectX 11 and Windows 8. Fire Strike will be one of three benchmarking tools released in the upcoming 3DMark, which should be released before the end of the year. The other two tests are Cloud Gate for notebook PCs, and Ice Storm for Android and iOS devices.

FutureMark's James Gallagher said in September that "it looks like swirling fire embers are THE must-have next-gen feature." The Fire Strike trailer makes full use of that, as well as "tessellation, dynamic particle illumination and shadowing, smoke simulation using grid-based fluid dynamics, volume ray casting with shadows and a wide variety of post processing effects including depth of field, blooms, distortions and various lens effects."