FurMark 2 Exits Beta To Beat Your Gaming PC's Graphics Card Into Submission
After almost 2 decades, the developers behind FurMark have officially launched a successor with 64-bit support and more modern features, compared to the original version. FurMark 2, arrives with the aforementioned 64-bit support, Vulkan support and monitoring support for all of the latest graphics cards, including GeForce RTX 40 series, Radeon RX 7000 series and Arc A-series. The program recently came out of beta and is one of the most demanding GPU benchmarks on the internet currently. It's a great test for enthusiasts, tweakers and system-builders to make sure their graphics card(s) and systems are stable and functioning properly.
The original version is also known to be one of the most notorious GPU stress-testing applications in existence for burning up GPUs due to its extremely-intensive synthetic workload that can wring out the maximum amount of power and thermal capacity your GPU is capable of producing. That said, this behavior is typically found when utilizing FurMark to stabilize a GPU overclock. Any GPU running at stock settings should be able to run FurMark just fine, since the GPU is not running beyond its designated specifications.
There are also a ton of minor updates that have been added as well. FurMark 2 comes with an improved command line, that apparently features more functionality than the command line interface in the original version. FurMark 2 benchmark scores can now be published online, similar to 3DMark. Modern versions of GPU Shark2 and GPU-Z have also been integrated enabling FurMark 2 to monitor modern GPUs.
As far as we can tell, the main “furry doughnut” stress test has not been altered, so this new version will potentially still be capable of burning up GPUs in the right scenarios. But again, this problem is primarily attributed to users overclocking their GPUs while running FurMark 2 to check for stability.
The development team behind FurMark is rigorously updating FurMark 2 (now available for download), adding a ton of extra updates with every single new patch. The latest patch, version 2.1.0.2 was released on February 15th and is one of its biggest patches yet. The patch alone fixes several bugs and adds nearly 30 new AIB partner GPU models to its list of supported graphics cards.
