BASEMARK GPU

The Ultimate Graphics Performance Benchmark

Basemark GPU is a professional evaluation tool to evaluate and compare graphics performance across mobile and desktop platforms. Uniquely, it supports all major graphics APIs and operating systems.

Consumers can check their device performance for free with Basemark GPU and the integrated Power Board online results comparison service.

For OEMs and processor vendors, Basemark offers a fully featured version, please see the licensing section below.

Basemark offers a complimentary license for independent media publications to be used in their product reviews.

Rocksolid

Basemark GPU is developed on top of Rocksolid®, a Basemark proprietary graphics engine. Written in C++, this engine allows us to efficiently develop objective benchmarks for multiple operating systems and graphics APIs.

Rocksolid Engine architecture abstracts resources and rendering. In this way, all platforms run the tests with the same workload. This functionality makes the benchmark reliable between different operating systems. The small footprint, efficient and fast Rocksolid Engine is also being used in many industrial applications.

Advanced features

Basemark GPU runs through an advanced game-like scene with up to tens of thousands of individual draw calls per frame. Thesetests showcase the benefit of new graphics APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12, both regarding performance and in content production:Allowing designers to craft a massive number of individual objects without being limited by older API instancing strategies.

Results

You can easily compare your device performance to other device performances in the integrated Basemark Power Board 3.0 service. The free version always submits all results to the Basemark Power Board 3.0. In corporate and media versions the results submission is optional.

Basemark GPU

Supported Platforms

The rendering module can use OpenGL ES or Vulkan for Android and Metal for iOS and MacOS. For PC or Linux desktop computers, it can use OpenGL, Vulkan or DirectX12, depending on which APIs the system supports.

Rocksolid architecture makes all visible entities (including the application controls and graphics tests) look the same on all platforms.

Main features

Our aim is to make it easy to test and compare your devices. To achieve this, Basemark GPU offers multiple different modes that will give you official test results. These can be then submitted to the Power Board 3.0 results page. Payable versions also enable you to run custom tests with a wide selection of different options.

  • Ease of use, all the APIs in one software
  • Updated, easy to use Launcher
  • Made to work with all Personal Computers, desktops, tablets and laptops
  • Custom options to allow tinkerers to do detailed benchmarking
  • Automatic upload to online (on free consumer version)

System requirements

A graphics card with Vulkan 1.0, OpenGL 4.5, Metal 2 or DirectX 12 support and supporting at least one of following texture compression formats: Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), Ericsson Texture Compression version 2 (ETC2) or Block Compression (BC7).

Additional requirements:

  • Android 7 or later. ‘arm-v7a’, ‘arm64-v8a’, ‘x86’ or ‘x86_64’ SoC
  • Windows 10 or later with x86_64 or arm64 CPU
  • Linux Flatpak support or Ubuntu 18.04 on x86_64 CPU
  • iOS version 13.0 or later
  • macOS Catalina or later, x86_64 CPU
  • 12GB RAM on 64-bit systems (6GB RAM on 32-bit systems)
  • 2GB video RAM

Versions

Basemark GPU Free

The Free version of the software is for home or private use only and offers end-users the ability to test and evaluate their systems’ graphics capabilities. This version always submits the test data to Basemark’s Power Board 3.0 and displays a single system performance score without any breakdown analysis.

Basemark GPU Corporate

The Corporate version is a fully-featured commercial version for companies. Please contact our sales for more information!

Features Free Corporate
GPU Score (Native and Offscreen) Yes Yes
Test Score Details No Yes
Select Test Yes Yes
Forced result submit Yes No
Internet Connection Required1 Yes No
Custom Configurations Limited Yes
Test Automation No Yes
Ability to render arbitrary screen(s) No Yes
Data Export No Yes

1Free version will not show the test results without a connection to Basemark Power Board 3.0 database.

Modes

High Quality

Basemark GPU: High Quality mode targets Desktop systems using high-resolution textures, advanced effects, increased number of objects and demanding geometry based on today’s AAA PC game standards.

Medium Quality

Basemark GPU: Medium Quality mode targets Mobile systems based on today’s AAA Mobile game standards. The medium Quality mode is a subset of a High-Quality mode regarding decreased texture resolution, number of objects, amount of geometry and limited effects.

Mode Official Offscreen Resolution Max Triangles Per Frame Max Texture Resolution Max Memory Requirement Max Draw Calls Per Frame
High Quality 3840×2160 ~2 M 4096×4096 4 GB ~10k
Medium Quality 1920×1080 ~0.7 M 2048×2048 1 GB ~2000

In the High-Quality mode, the user can enable most of the advanced features with high-quality settings. In the Medium Quality mode, some of the advanced effects have been either disabled or limited in quality, to simulate a realistic workload on high-end mobile devices.

To circumvent VSync limitations on mobile devices, we render each benchmark frame off-screen and display only a miniature image of each frame. This way no frame is dropped, and the results are accurate. If you want to see the graphics in their full glory, please choose Experience Mode.

On mobile systems, the user can select the Native (OnScreen) or OffScreen test. The Native test runs the test using the mobile device native resolution, thus revealing how well the content runs on that specific device. The Mobile Offscreen test always runs on a fixed 1920×1080 resolution, and this result is comparable with other devices that may use the different native resolution. Both tests send their results to the Basemark Power Board 3.0.

Feature High Quality Medium Quality
Physically Based Shading Enabled Enabled
Tiled Forward+ Rendering Enabled Enabled
High-Dynamic Range (HDR) / Tone Mapping Enabled Enabled
Cascaded Shadow Maps Enabled Only one shadow map
Bloom Enabled Enabled
Depth of Field Enabled Disabled
Translucent Objects Enabled Disabled
Ambient Occlusion Dynamic Static
Screen space volumetric light scattering Enabled Enabled (Low Res.)

Basemark also offers Media version for established representatives of the media. Please contact us with the contact form in the end of this page or send us to email to marketing@basemark.com

Benchmark Development Program

The Basemark® GPU benchmarking tool has been developed in close cooperation with leading semiconductor companies. Our partners, such as Imagination Technologies, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Renesas, all participate in Basemark’s Benchmark Development Program (BDP). Our tight-knit collaboration with competing GPU and CPU development companies ensures that the Basemark® GPU benchmark offers optimal reliability and maintains objectivity through adherence to group standards.

Our benchmarks are built strictly to meet the specifications set by the industry. Neutrality and unbiased analytics is core to our philosophy, and we base our reputation on a lack of favoritism towards any specific manufacturer’s products.

We welcome all the interested to join our program as a partner, let us know and we will be in contact!

Recommendations

  • Always run the Basemark GPU as an Admin
  • At the end of the official benchmark run, it might take some time to submit the results and fetch the data
  • The Cross-platform comparison can be made with the Custom test. Choose the Medium Content quality and keep the same settings in compared devices
  • For Android users, if the loader unable to download the assets, restart the device and try again
  • The OpenGL API does not support choosing different GPUs
  • The Free version always submits official scores automatically to our Basemark Power Board 3.0.
  • The Corporate version does not submit scores to Power Board 3.0. For more information about the Corporate version, please contact our global sales team
  • Known issue: When unpacking the .tar.gz make sure that there are no spaces in the folder names. It will give you an error when trying to run the benchmark.
  • For Android users, the launcher will download all the assets before the first run; this will take approx 1.6 gigabytes
  • For installing Basemark GPU Flatpak on Debian distribution, Flathub repository needs to be added manually, as it is not included by default: 
    flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Interested?

If you need more detailed support, please let us know via social media or by email. We have a team in place to help you!

For licensing inquiries:
sales@basemark.com
For technical support:
support@basemark.com
For media related questions:
marketing@basemark.com
Contact us