UL Options, the builders of the favored 3DMark benchmarking utility, have launched a brand new cross-platform ray tracing benchmark. It is known as Photo voltaic Bay and it is obtainable as a free replace for house owners of 3DMark.
Photo voltaic Bay is designed to be used with built-in GPUs together with these in laptops and cell phones. It is constructed utilizing the Vulkan 1.1 API and options each a benchmark and a stress take a look at. The latter is certain to empty your battery life rapidly.
Ray Tracing is rapidly changing into an integral a part of PC gaming graphics. For a while, 3DMark has included the Port Royal and Speedway benchmarks, however they’re designed for graphics playing cards with a lot increased efficiency and extra importantly, increased energy budgets. Ray tracing within the cellular house remains to be in its nascent levels, and a 3DMark ray tracing benchmark that is aimed toward battery-powered units like telephones, tablets, and laptops could be very a lot welcome.
There are three levels to the benchmark, with the second and third levels growing the ray tracing workload by 100%. The benchmark will ship a rating for comparability functions. That is pretty self explanatory, however the stress take a look at will probably be helpful to check for throttling. In case you’re seeking to tune a laptop computer for an optimum mix of cooling, noise degree, and clock velocity, a take a look at like Photo voltaic Bay will probably be very helpful.
I ran Photo voltaic Bay on a system I’m at present utilizing for testing reminiscence. It is obtained an RTX 4090, i9 13900K, and 2x16GB of DDR5-5600. The system scored 194,320 with all three sections returning over 700 FPS. The RTX 4090 is a beast, for certain.
For comparability, the very best AMD end result seems to be 156,489 with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. That is not a foul exhibiting for an AMD card, although playing cards like this and the RTX 4090 are certainly CPU-limited.
Home windows customers can get hold of 3DMark and Photo voltaic Bay for $34.99 through the standard channels resembling Steam, Epic Video games, or from UL Options straight. Android customers can seize it from the Google Play retailer.
As for iOS availability, there is no phrase but, nevertheless it’s more likely to turn out to be obtainable in time. The Wild Life and Sling Shot benchmarks can be found for iOS, and it does help Vulkan, however would require further work to port it over to Apple’s Steel API.