Well known to experts in the Graphic card3DMark is evolving and integrating a new ray tracing test scene.
Specializing in performance measurement tools, UL is launching a new module for its flagship software, the famous 3DMark.
Ray tracing in the spotlight
The module in question is a new scene that comes in addition to the well-known Fire Strike or TimeSpy. Once is not custom, this scene is however not reserved for a particular platform.
Indeed, called Solar Bay, it runs both on smartphones and on the graphics cards of our PCs. It evaluates graphics performance with a focus on ray tracing capabilities, an increasingly fashionable feature. However, there is no question of replacing the Port Royal scene which was already evaluating ray tracing.
It is the multi-platform aspect of Solar Bay that makes all the difference and justifies the presence of the two scenes within 3DMark.
A new scene, two distinct parts
The company UL specifies in its press release that Solar Bay is divided into two parts with, on the one hand, the benchmark itself and, on the other, what it calls the stress test.
Solar Bay benchmark
” Run the 3DMark Solar Bay Benchmark to measure a device’s ability to deliver instant performance over a short period of time. This test mimics mobile games where the game loop is a series of short bursts of activity. Solar Bay returns four scores: an overall score and three subscores for each ray tracing section. These scores reflect your device’s frame rate in Solar Bay; the higher the frame rate, the better the score “.
Solar Bay stress test
” The Solar Bay stress test is a longer test that shows how a device will perform over long periods of ray-traced gaming. It reflects a longer session of ray tracing gaming. This test runs the Solar Bay workload in a loop for 20 minutes, producing a graph showing how performance varies during the test. An ideal result is a stable set of results showing that performance is not limited “.
RTX 4090 versus Snapdragon 8 Gen 2?
Our colleagues on the site VideoCardz did not drag to exploit this additional scene. They point out in passing that it is inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope and its design in 18 hexagonal mirrors.
They first took the test to a GeForce RTX 4090-based PC configuration and scored 135,800 points. Secondly, a Samsung S23 Ultra smartphone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC (Adreno 740 GPU) went on the grill for a score of 5,539 points.
These results suggest that the NVIDIA spearhead is 24.5 times more powerful than the Qualcomm SoC used by Samsung. Be careful however, in the first case, it is a result called “graphics” and in the other “overall”. We should be sure that they operate in the same way.
Let’s finish by specifying that the scene is now available to everyone. This is a 3DMark module accessible for free on Android via the Google Play store, but paying (33.99 euros) in PC version on the Epic Games store, Steam or the official UL website.
Source: UL press release
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