UL Solutions, the firm behind the well known 3DMark benchmarks suite, has just released 3DMark Solar Bay. This is a new cross-platform benchmark that's designed to measure and compare ray tracing performance. At the time of writing the benchmark is available for both Windows and Android users, across a range of stores (e.g. Android Play, Windows Steam).
In a press release about Solar Bay, UL first describes the purpose and scope of ray tracing graphics technology, in case anyone has been living under a rock since the Nvidia Turing generation. It then indicates that ray tracing is quite mainstream in 2023, with dedicated GPUs in desktops and laptops having excellent ray tracing acceleration for several years, and both iGPUs and smartphones now boast some usable ray tracing frills. It thus sets the scene for why a benchmark like Solar Bay is now useful.
If you are more interested in PC ray tracing performance, and not so much cross-platform comparisons, UL reminds us that it already has "heavier ray tracing benchmarks" like Port Royal and Speed Way. That hasn't stopped legions of 3DMark testers from running this new set of tests on their ultra-powerful RTX 4090 cards, though. Check out the 3DMark Solar Bay leaderboards on the official site.
