The development team from UL Solutions, a division of the independent organization Underwriters Laboratories, has released the 3DMark “Solar Bay”, a new cross-platform ray tracing benchmark, which determines the performance of the integrated or dedicated GPU or graphics card on the x86 system as well as the ARM GPUs can be compared to each other. The PCGH readers from the community of the PCGHX forum “benchen” are already busy using their systems and posting the first results.
3DMark Solar Bay is divided into three stages, with each stage linearly increasing ray tracing utilization by 100 percent. The cross-platform design makes it possible, for example, to compare dedicated desktop graphics cards with ARM graphics units integrated in mobile SoCs.
PCGH sends the Radeon RX 7900 GRE into the race
The first PCGH players have already published their benchmark results from the new 3DMark Solar Bay in the “3DMark ranking list: Geforce and Radeon graphics cards in the benchmark” thread. Among them are, for example, an AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, AMD Radeon RX 6800 and AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT as well as an Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 Super while PCGH editor Raffael Vötter already has a Geforce RTX 4090 and the Radeon RX 7900 GRE in the race for the sent “Raytraced Crown”. And how fast is their graphics cards?
Based on the current results from the PCGHX forum, the graphics cards tested so far are classified as follows:
- 3DMark Solar Bay (V1.0)
- Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090: 205,000 points
- AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT: 91,000 points
- AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE: 89,000 points
- Nvidia Geforce RTX 4070: 86,000 points
- Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 Super: 60,000 points
- AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT: 21,000 points
As always, the thread “3DMark ranking list: Geforce and Radeon graphics cards in the benchmark” invites you to participate. More than 400 articles on 22 pages also invite you to research 3DMark results. As expected, the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 is once again the absolute GPU performance peak.
Arm graphics chips can also be measured and compared
A selection of further exciting results from the PCGH readers will be entered here on an ongoing basis. As the Videocardz website reports, a tested Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra with the current Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy and the Adreno 740 GPU achieved a relatively low benchmark result of around 5,500 points compared to the desktop PC.
Ray tracing stress test for 20 minutes continuous load with rays
In addition to the GPU test, UL Solutions introduces a ray tracing stress test using the same scene as the benchmark. However, this stress test extends over a period of 20 minutes and provides a comprehensive diagram with evaluations and the corresponding results after the actual stability test.
Available through Steam, Epic Games and Google Play
The new ray tracing benchmark is now available for Android and Windows via the Epic Games Store and Steam game distribution platforms. The Android version is free, while the PC version requires an update or add-on for those who already own the paid benchmark. The official press release from UL Solutions provides further information.
Source: UL Solutions
