The new 3DMark benchmark lets you test the ray tracing performance of your Android phone

UL Options, the builders of the favored 3DMark benchmarking software, have launched a brand new cross-platform ray tracing benchmark. It is referred to 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 cellphones. It is constructed utilizing the Vulkan 1.1 API and options each a benchmark and a stress check. The latter is certain to empty your battery life shortly.

Ray Tracing is shortly 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 cell house remains to be in its nascent phases, and a 3DMark ray tracing benchmark that is geared toward battery-powered units like telephones, tablets, and laptops may be very a lot welcome.

There are three phases to the benchmark, with the second and third phases growing the ray tracing workload by 100%. The benchmark will ship a rating for comparability functions. That is pretty self explanatory, however the stress check can be helpful to check for throttling. When you’re trying to tune a laptop computer for an optimum mix of cooling, noise degree, and clock pace, a check like Photo voltaic Bay can be very helpful.

I ran Photo voltaic Bay on a system I’m at present utilizing for testing reminiscence. It is acquired 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 positive.

For comparability, one of the best AMD outcomes seems to be 156,489 with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. That is not a foul exhibiting for an AMD card, although card like this and the RTX 4090 are certainly CPU-limited.

Home windows customers can acquire 3DMark and Photo voltaic Bay for $34.99 through the standard channels reminiscent of 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, however it’s prone to change into obtainable in time. The Wild Life and Sling Shot benchmarks can be found for iOS, and it does help Vulkan, however would require extra work to port it over to Apple’s Metallic API.