UL Benchmarks has added a new "Night Raid" test to 3DMark designed to evaluate the performance of laptops, tablets, and other mobile computing devices with integrated graphics. To celebrate the release, UL Benchmarks is offering a 75 percent discount on the Advanced Edition when purchased on Steam or its own website. That knocks the price down from $29.99 to $7.49.
You can still grab 3DMark's Basic Edition for free, and it even includes the new Night Raid test. What you get with the Advanced Edition are additional tests that run at higher resolutions, like Fire Strike Extreme and Ultra, hardware monitoring, access to custom benchmark setting, the ability to skip the demo option, and a few other perks. You also need the Advanced Edition if you plan to save your results online.
Whether you opt for the free or paid version, the new Night Raid test opens up 3DMark to a new class of systems. Not that you couldn't benchmark laptops with integrated graphics on the other tests, this one is just more relevant. It's a DirectX 12 benchmark like Time Spy, but less demanding.
"So you might wonder what a Night Raid score can tell you about a device's gaming capabilities? We calibrate new 3DMark tests around a reference score of 5,000. In our testing, we found that a notebook PC that scored 5,000 in 3DMark Night Raid could run Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 70 frames per second, Dota 2 at 70 fps, and League of Legends at 80 fps using low to medium quality settings at 1080p resolution," UL Benchmarks says.
There are two parts to Night Raid, a graphics test and a CPU test. The graphics test features dynamic reflections, ambient occlusion, tessellation, complex particle systems, and post-processing effects, while the CPU tests runs a physics simulation, occlusion culling, and procedural generation.
UL Benchmarks is also working on a ray tracing benchmark that combines real-time ray tracing with existing techniques to enhance reflections and other effects. It doesn't have a name yet, but it's being built from the ground up and will run on any system that supports Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API.
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