Want a real test for your RTX 5090 gaming PC? 3DMark's new ray tracing benchmark looks fearsome

When it comes to synthetic gaming benchmarks, 3DMark is where it's at, and the suite now has a more punishing version of its ray tracing test.

Say hello to Solar Bay Extreme which has just been announced by UL Solutions (as VideoCardz noticed) and is now available for free as an update to 3DMark. (Although you need to pay for the benchmark suite in the first place, at least on Windows or Mac - it's free for mobile).

This is, of course, a fresh take on the existing Solar Bay ray tracing test, but an extreme version as the name makes clear.

UL Solutions explains the new test:

"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."

It sounds like there's a lot more going on, then, and apparently that includes ray-traced specular reflections that play over all visible surfaces, as well as glass reflections and ray-traced soft shadows. Indeed, the extreme version is up to 5x heavier in terms of workload compared to the base version of Solar Bay.

You can purchase 3DMark from Steam where it's priced at $35, though I'd strongly advise you wait for a sale as you're likely to get the benchmarking suite a lot cheaper - it's been sold for as little as $5 in the past (so stick it on your wishlist). It's also available via the Epic Games Store, or direct from UL Solutions.

More and more games are bringing in ray tracing, at least in the single-player world, and most recently that includes Dying Light: The Beast and The Outer Worlds 2 which have been confirmed to have RT and DLSS 4.