UL Benchmarks Launches Solar Bay Extreme for Ultra-Demanding Ray Tracing Testing

Keeping itself at the forefront of encouraging GPUs to melt through sheer exertion, UL benchmarks has launched the next version of its Solar Bar benchmark: the Extreme edition. This version is far more demanding and raises the bar for owners of the top gaming GPUs who want to see what they can handle.

The original Solar Bay benchmark was released in 2023 on Android, iOS, and Windows, and was designed to push graphics cards to the limit in terms of ray tracing. At the time, that mainly meant it was an Nvidia benchmark; while AMD's hardware can do ray tracing, only its latest generation has really proved capable enough of not destroying frame rates as soon as you enable path tracing and similar lighting features.

Solar Bay Extreme, however, is an entirely different beast. It adds ray-traced specular reflections, glass reflections, and soft shadows for directional light, as VideoCardz reports . This will make it a challenge for even the latest generations of graphics cards, like Nvidia's RTX 5090 and AMD's RX 9070 XT , especially when they're overclocked.

The benchmark scene has also been expanded, putting more reflective stuff on screen to cause havoc in the GPU's ray accelerators. It now shows a rival team competing to build a solar array, not only making it a more interesting scene, but one that's much more demanding to render. Indeed, UL claims in the trailer above that this benchmark is up to five times "heavier" on the ray tracing than its namesake.

This benchmark is designed to be the ultimate litmus test for a PC's gaming and ray rendering ability. Although it is primarily useful for getting a PC ready for the latest demanding ray-traced games, like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, it's also useful for 3D rendering and CAD systems.

The new benchmark works on Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS and can be downloaded for free on Steam .