3DMark Solar Bay is a cross-platform, ray tracing benchmark for Android and PC

[Shawn Knight]

In a nutshell: UL Solutions (formerly Futuremark) has released a new cross-platform benchmark capable of measuring ray traced graphics performance on both Android devices and Windows PCs. 3DMark Solar Bay was built using the Vulkan 1.1 API and offers two test methods: a quick jaunt to measure immediate performance and a stress test that evaluates how performance might change over an extended period of heavy load.

Solar Bay plays out across three stages, with each section increasing linearly by 100 percent. The benchmark provides four results upon completion including an overall score and the average frame rate from each scene.

The stress test, meanwhile, runs the workload in a 20 minute loop and produces a chart that highlights performance changes over the course of the run. Ideally, you want to see consistent performance from start to finish as any slowdowns on the back half of the run would suggest thermal throttling from the GPU.

The stress test could also be used to ensure your GPU cooling solution is up to snuff.

UL said Solar Bay results can be compared across supported platforms, so that is exactly what VideoCardz did. The team conducted a quick run using a PC equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, which produced an overall score of 135,800 and an average of 515 frames per second across all three runs.

For comparison, the benchmark was then run on a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphone. It is one of the most powerful handsets you can buy today but of course, it can't hold a candle to a high-end PC. The S23 Ultra turned out an overall score of 5,539 and an average frame rate of 21.06 across the three scenes. With some quick math, we can see that the RTX 4090 is about 24.5 times faster than the S23 Ultra.

3DMark is available on a variety of platforms including Steam, the Epic Games Store, and directly from UL Solutions. You can pick up the Android version directly from our downloads section.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/99797-3dmark-solar-bay-cross-platform-ray-tracing-benchmark.html

 

[Porkous]

On average the whole soc on mobiles consume 3.99w, with max of 7.82w...

The GPU these days is 1.8TF. That's like ps4 and 16 billion transistors.

More pc quality games to mobiles would be great. Nintendo switch can run the Witcher 3 though, with like 300 Gflops.

Edit. Numbers are approximate.

 

[nnguy2]

Galaxy S23 Ultra is 24x better at keeping me busy when I'm on the toilet.

 

[Watzupken]

I wonder what's the point of the comparison though. 24.5x more Ray tracing performance, but also consumes 40 to 45x more power. Most mobile chips don't draw more than 10W simple because it does not have the cooling solution to keep up. So using 10W as a point of reference for the S23 Ultra is giving the dGPU and advantage.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I wonder what's the point of the comparison though. 24.5x more Ray tracing performance, but also consumes 40 to 45x more power. Most mobile chips don't draw more than 10W simple because it does not have the cooling solution to keep up. So using 10W as a point of reference for the S23 Ultra is giving the dGPU and advantage.

Show an example where the chip can pull more then 10 watts. I'll wait. If you cant find one, then this complaining is moot, since we can "well theoretically" all day.

 

[neeyik]

This is why Arm should ask more for their chips... Rather than a mere 1-2%

Part of the reason they don't is that Arm doesn't design chips, as such. Take the Cortex-A57, as an example -- it's implemented in Nvidia's Tegra X1, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810, and Samsung's Exynos 5333. These are all very different chips and the integration of the A57 is almost entirely down to the engineers of those three companies, not Arm.

Another aspect is that Arm's designs are typically used in chips that are very low in cost, so demanding large fees to use the IP would likely result in a fairly hefty drop in revenue. By keeping the fees small, Arm has worked its way into just about every branch of the semiconductor industry, making it a pretty indispensable company.

 

[erickmendes]

As an old man once said... But can the S23 ultra run Crysis?

 

[SalmanIsHere]

The innovation in mobile space would have been groundbreaking if only Nvidia got Arm. Now we will be stuck with weak mobile GPUs for years to come.

 

[Porkous]

The innovation in mobile space would have been groundbreaking if only Nvidia got Arm. Now we will be stuck with weak mobile GPUs for years to come.

A GPU at 7.8w consumption that can do ray tracing is not innovative? AFAIK AMD innovated more than Nvidia and in pc space, consoles dictate new innovations.