UL Benchmarks has released Solar Bay Extreme, a major update to the cross-platform 3DMark Solar Bay benchmark that cranks up ray tracing demands for both desktop and mobile devices. The update is now available as a free upgrade for existing 3DMark owners and is designed to showcase the capabilities of current hardware in pushing modern lighting techniques. Everyone can now run the test to compare scores on 3DMark leaderboards and utilize the built-in stress mode to monitor for throttling and stability issues during extended runs. Solar Bay Extreme runs on native APIs for each platform, utilizing Vulkan on Android, Metal on Apple platforms, and DirectX 12 on Windows, ensuring results that accurately reflect how real games behave.

The new edition brings more detailed scenes and a heavier ray tracing workload, including ray-traced specular reflections on rough and glossy surfaces, glass reflections and soft ray-traced shadows for directional lights. UL also added a second assembly bay to the scene where a rival team builds a solar array, which adds geometric complexity and varied lighting that exposes differences between GPUs and drivers.