Since the original Solar Bay Benchmark launched on Android, iOS, and Windows, hundreds of thousands of gamers around the world have run it to see how their devices might handle the next generation of games developed for mobile devices and lightweight computers.

However, gaming technology moves fast, and just over the horizon are always new processors with the capability to run even more realistic lighting in games at minimal battery drain.

To be ready for these, we think now is the time to clock things up with an extreme version of Solar Bay. It significantly increases the existing raytracing workload with additional raytracing implementations such as ray-traced specular reflections for all surfaces and glass reflections, and ray-traced soft shadows for directional light. 

This time is a little different from previous extreme benchmarks of ours - not only have we turned up the scene heaviness with new raytracing techniques, but we’ve expanded the scene with an additional assembly bay. where a rival team is competing to build their solar array faster.

Solar Bay Extreme is a free update for everyone who owns 3DMark and supports Windows, Windows on Arm, macOS, iOS, and Android.

3DMark for Windows 2.32.8426

Added

• Added the 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme Benchmark

• Added the 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme Stress Test

Updated

• Fixed an issue where Steel Nomad and Steel Nomad Light could fail with a dxcompiler.dll error

• Minor bug fixes to the following benchmarks, scores are not affected.

  • Steel Nomad

  • Steel Nomad Light

  • Solar Bay

  • Wild Life

  • Wild Life Extreme

  • Port Royal

Known Issues:

• The Solar Bay Extreme Benchmark will not run on some Windows on Arm devices due to a driver issue. If you experience this issue, please update using the Windows Update function or contact your device manufacturer for the latest driver version.

3DMark for macOS 1.1.266

Added

• Added the 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme Benchmark

• Added the 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme Stress Test

Updated

• Optimized all macOS benchmarks to reduce the CPU overhead. Scores are unaffected in most scenarios, but may improve for lighter tests run on Macs with very high-end SoCs.