We’re excited to announce Solar Bay, a new cross-platform benchmark for testing the ray traced graphics performance of Windows PCs and high-end Android devices. It measures graphics performance by rendering a demanding, ray traced game-like scene in real time. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4462215/a451cc0b0b5cd70b9a38380931216e89d85d8fc4.png[/img] [h2]Compare ray tracing performance across platforms.[/h2] Ray tracing is the showcase technology for Solar Bay, being used for simulating real-time reflections. Compared to traditional rasterization, ray-traced scenes produce far more realistic lighting. While dedicated desktop and laptop GPUs have supported ray tracing for several years now, it’s only recently that integrated GPUs and Android devices have been capable of running real-time ray-traced games at frame rates acceptable to gamers. Built using the Vulkan 1.1 API, Solar Bay offers two new tests for ray tracing capable hardware: a quick-to-run benchmark measuring immediate performance, and a longer stress test that measures how device performance changes over extended periods of heavy load. Solar Bay’s ray traced workload increases over three stages, with each section increasing linearly by 100%. On PC, Solar Bay complements our heavier ray tracing benchmarks Port Royal and Speed Way. With Solar Bay, 3DMark has a great range of ray tracing workloads, making it an excellent way to measure how your Windows or Android device’s ray tracing performance scales. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4462215/73ff007f91768676283fa2f0c270697ce2fa0b8a.png[/img] [h2]Solar Bay benchmark[/h2] Run the 3DMark Solar Bay benchmark to measure a device's ability to provide instant performance for a short period of time. Solar Bay produces four scores on completion: an overall score and three sub-scores 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. [h2]Solar Bay stress test[/h2] The Solar Bay stress test is a longer test that shows how a device will perform over extended periods of ray-traced gaming. This test runs the Solar Bay workload in a loop for twenty minutes, with the result being a chart showing how performance varies over the test. An ideal result is a steady set of results showing test performance is not throttled. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/4462215/71d7d8401a4fcdf9831994280897db2f0ce775cd.png[/img] [h2]Available now[/h2] Solar Bay is included when you purchase 3DMark, and is a free update to all owners of 3DMark on Steam. To run Solar Bay, you need a graphics card with support for Vulkan ray tracing pipeline. https://store.steampowered.com/app/223850/3DMark/ [h2]What's new in 3DMark v2.27.8155 [/h2] This update supports the launch of the 3DMark Solar Bay. Other benchmark scores are not affected. New [list] [*]Added 3DMark Solar Bay, a cross-platform ray tracing benchmark. [/list] Fixed [list] [*]Fixed an issue where some 3DMark tests would fail if 3DMark was installed in a directory mounted to an NTFS volume. [/list]