Basemark Teases GPUScore: In Vitro, The Industry's First Mobile Ray Tracing Benchmark

Hardware benchmarks specialist, Basemark, is getting ready to release a new product called ‘GPUScore: In Vitro’. In brief, In Vitro is claimed to be the world’s first ray tracing technology benchmark for mobile devices. The tool has been crafted to provide users and reviewers a good reference point for judging new and future generation mobile devices and their capabilities in the growing number of mobile games sporting ray-traced effects. In Vitro joins three existing Basemark GPUScore benchmarks for mobile, including; Relic of Life, The Expedition, and Sacred Path.

In Vitro has been developed to facilitate standardized ensured ray tracing game engine workloads across devices. It uses ray tracing techniques to simulate real-life graphical niceties including lighting, reflections and shadows with Basemark’s own custom Rocksolid Engine. It is commendable that Basemark tries to create this type of level playing field, but also inevitable that it won’t directly correlate with different mobile GPU architectures performance across the range of game engines available today. In other words, despite Basemark’s best efforts, its ray tracing performance will likely show some architectures in a better light than others. Similarly, on PC, some game engines prefer AMD or NVIDIA architectures and that’s why single benchmarks and game tests are useful if nothing else is available, but broad wide-ranging reviews and tests are needed for consumers to check system performance before spending their cash.

Basemark’s new mobile benchmark has a few hardware requirements you should be aware of, but they probably aren’t too strenuous for mobile gamers pondering over using this software tool. To run In Vitro you must have a device packing Android 12 or later with Vulkan 1.1+ and SPIR-V support, ray tracing support, ETC compression support, and have 4GB or more of unified memory (but the associated white paper says 3GB is enough). If your device satisfies these requirements, you will be able to run In Vitro in one of four modes; official, official native, custom mode, and experience mode.

The new GPUScore: In Vitro is “coming soon,” so we can’t run it as yet. We have some screenshots, as reproduced above, which show the ‘medieval’ environment. In Vitro benchmark 3D ray-traced scenes are claimed to be a fit for a wide range of game genres such as; RPG, MMORPG, quest, or even first-person type games.