Unity, the world's leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today released the 2021 Gaming Report: Unity Insights from 2020 and Predicted Trends for 2021, which provides a comprehensive look at how gaming changed for both players and creators one year into the pandemic. With more than 2.8 billion monthly active consumers of content created or operated with Unity solutions, this report represents the largest dataset on COVID-19's impact on gaming. For a free copy of Unity's 2021 Gaming Report, please visit this page.

"It's still too early to tell if changed habits will become the new norm once the pandemic is over, but given our understanding of past player behavior changes, it would be surprising to see many players revert," said Ingrid Lestiyo, Senior VP and General Manager, Operate Solutions, Unity. "In a year where online entertainment content - more than ever - became the cornerstone of social connections for so many when seeking a semblance of normalcy, Unity Operate Solutions was there to provide reliable, scalable solutions that helped keep the experiences connected and players engaged. Our amazing creators are here for that reason, and our mission is to enable them to focus on, and produce more, content with the technology we provide. While the nature of work may have changed for many game studios over the last year, the tools that help to power their success continued to deliver results that kept players happy, and revenue for developers of all sizes growing."

When AMD announced its Ryzen 5000 series of processors based on the new Zen 3 architecture, the performance of these processors was the best on the market. Even in our own testing, we have found that AMD's Zen 3 core is the highest performing core on the market, even beating Intel's latest and greatest, the 10th generation of Core processors. However, Intel has been doing some silent work and the company has developed a new core to be used in the 11th generation "Rocket Lake" platform. Codenamed Cypress Cove, the design is representing a backport of the 10 nm Sunny Cove design, supposed to bring around 19% IPC improvement across the board.

If you were wondering if that was enough to catch up with AMD's Zen 3 IPC performance, look no further because we have Geekbench 5 performance results of Intel's 35 Watt Core i9-11900T processor. Having a base frequency of only 1.51 GHz, the CPU is capable of boosting one or two cores to the very high speed of 4.9 GHz, giving us a good example of the single-threaded performance we can expect from this CPU. In GB5 tests, the Core i9-11900T has managed to score 1717 points in the single-threaded test and 8349 points in multi-threaded results. Comparing that to something like AMD Ryzen 5800X, which scores 1674 points in single-threaded results, Rocket Lake's Cypress Cove core has managed to be 2.5% faster than Zen 3. However, in multi-threaded results, the AMD chip is unmatched as the low TDP of the Intel processor is stopping it from reaching full performance.

DirectX 12 Ultimate adds powerful new features and capabilities to DirectX 12 including DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1, Mesh Shaders, Sampler Feedback, and Variable Rate Shading (VRS). After DirectX 12 Ultimate was announced, we started adding new tests to 3DMark to show how games can benefit from these new features. Our latest addition is the 3DMark Mesh Shader feature test, a new test that shows how game developers can boost frame rates by using mesh shaders in the graphics pipeline.

Intel is preparing to launch their latest generation Rocket Lake-S processors in the coming weeks. We recently saw some leaked Geekbench 5 scores for the eight-core Intel Core i7-11700K showing it beating the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in single-core performance. We have recently received some new benchmarks for the i9-11900K and i7-11700K this time in CPU-Z showing them once again best AMD in single-core performance.

The Cypress Cove core design found in these upcoming processors is expected to bring double-digit IPC gains over Skylake and this is reflected in these scores. Take all these benchmarks with a healthy dose of skepticism as we have no way of confirming these numbers until we can test the chips ourselves. The Intel Core i9-11900K gets a single thread score of 695.4 and a multi-thread score of 6522.1 which puts it 19% ahead of the i9-10900K and 3% ahead of the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in single-threaded performance. The processor still falls far behind the Ryzen 9 5950X in multi-threaded performance due to it having half the number of cores.

With the launch of AMD's next-generation mobile processors just around the corner, with an expected launch date in the beginning of 2021 at the CES virtual event. The Cezanne lineup, as it is called, is based on AMD's latest Zen 3 core, which brings many IPC improvements, along with better frequency scaling thanks to the refined architecture design. Today, we get to see just how much the new Cezanne generation brings to the table thanks to the GeekBench 5 submission. In the test system, a Ryzen 5 5600H mobile processor was used, found inside of a Xiaomi Mi Notebook, paired with 16 GB of RAM.

As a reminder, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600H is a six-core, twelve threaded processor. So you are wondering how the performance looks like. Well, in the single-core test, the Zen 3 enabled core has scored 1372 points, while the multi-threaded performance result equaled 5713 points. If we compare that to the last generation Zen 2 based "Renoir" design, the equivalent Ryzen 5 4600H processor, the new design is about 37% faster in single-threaded, and about 14% faster in multi-threaded workloads. We are waiting for the announcement to see the complete AMD Cezanne lineup and see the designs it will bring.

Intel is still in the work of testing and certification for their more complex graphics products based on their Xe microarchitectures, and that means that some tests are being done in well-known benchmarking platforms. Case in point, an Intel Xe GPU with a reported 128 EUs (1024 shading units), 3 GB of memory, and a clockspeed of 1.4 GHz ran through Geekbench, where it scored an... interesting 9,311 points in the OpenCL test.

This is more likely than not an engineering sample, considering that Intel's Iris Xe MAX wrapped in its Tiger Lake package can score up to 23,000 points. It is currently unclear if this particular Xe manifestation is running on Intel's Xe-LP or Xe-HPG architecture. This might be Intel's DG-2 product, which offers higher performance than their DG-1 discrete graphics card that is only available for system integrators.

AMD is preparing to launch its next-generation of EPYC processors codenamed Millan. Being based on the company's latest Zen 3 cores, the new EPYC generation is going to deliver a massive IPC boost, spread across many cores. Models are supposed to range anywhere from 16 to 64 cores, to satisfy all of the demanding server workloads. Today, thanks to the leak from ExecutableFix on Twitter, we have the first benchmark of a system containing two of the 64 core, 128 thread Zen 3 based EPYC Milan processors. Running in the 2P configuration the processors achieved a maximum boost clock of 3.7 GHz, which is very high for a server CPU with that many cores.

The system was able to produce a Cinebench R23 score of insane 87878 points. With that many cores, it is no wonder how it is done, however, we need to look at how does it fare against the competition. For comparison, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L processor with its 28 cores and 56 threads that boost to 4.0 GHz can score up to 49,876 points. Of course, the scaling to that many cores may not work very well in this example application, so we have to wait and see how it performs in other workloads before jumping to any conclusions. The launch date is unknown for these processors, so we have to wait and report as more information appears.

Over the last year, we've seen a lot of interest in a new category of PCs designed for content creators. With high-end specifications and serious styling, these new creator PCs are being marketed to animators, designers, photographers, videographers, musicians and other digital content creators. Today, to meet growing demand from our press and retail partners, we're releasing two new benchmarks for measuring the performance of creator PCs. These two benchmarks use popular Adobe applications to test PC performance for photo editing and video editing work.

Enthusiast creators now have easy access to many of the same software tools used by professionals. Add increasingly powerful, yet affordable PC hardware, and creators have everything they need to develop their talent and unlock their potential. For creators who make a living from their craft, focus and productivity are key. When the process gets in the way, creativity suffers. Even the smallest interruption can break the flow. Longer delays from loading images or exporting video files are even more frustrating. Creator PCs promise to smooth out the wrinkles in the production process. Many manufacturers are now offering dedicated systems for content creators. Benchmark scores offer an easy way for creators to compare the performance of these different systems.

When Apple announced that they are going to switch their Mac lineup from Intel-based x86 processors to the custom "Apple Silicon," everyone was wondering how the new processors will look and perform. To everyone's luck, Apple has just a few days ago announced its first Apple Silicon custom processor for MacBook. The M1, as the company calls it, is their first processor designed for higher-power and performance tasks The M1 features eight CPU cores (four high-performance and four-high efficiency) paired with eight cores dedicated to the graphics. On the die, there is also a 16-core neural engine made to accelerate machine learning tasks found in the new applications.

Today, we are getting the first GeekBench 5 CPU benchmarks that showcase just how far Apple has come with its custom design. What we have is the M1 processor found in MacBook Air. This Mac model features a passive cooling system, cooling a CPU with a base frequency of 3.2 GHz. The system scored 1719 points in the single-core result, and 6967 points in the multi-core result. The single-threaded results measure itself with some of the highest-end offerings from Intel and AMD, while the multi-threaded results are very good given the mix and match of small and big cores.

Maxon has recently released Cinebench R23 with an updated codebase to more closely reflect real-world Cinema 4D performance. Cinebench brings support for Apple silicon with the ARM-based M1 processor found in the latest generation Apple MacBooks. The benchmark now features a minimum runtime of 10 minutes to ensure the system reaches peak temperatures and measures a more realistic performance estimate. This change will reduce the scores for systems that throttle under sustained loads. The scores from Cinebench R23 are not comparable to scores from previous versions including Cinebench R20.

Cinebench R23 can now be downloaded for free from Maxon (250 MB).

Today, Chaos Group released V-Ray 5 Benchmark, a free standalone application that lets users quickly test their rendering speeds on any combination of CPUs and GPUs. V-Ray 5 Benchmark launches with three complex test scenes designed to assess V-Ray performance on CPU, GPU CUDA and GPU RTX cards.

Since launching, V-Ray Benchmark has become a standard for new hardware testing, helping countless users and journalists assess the rendering performance of new laptops, workstations, graphics cards and more. With V-Ray 5 Benchmark, these users can access its biggest update yet, making it easier to evaluate the latest technology against one of the most popular renderers in the world.

The launch of AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards on November 18 will end NVIDIA's monopoly on real-time raytracing. For the first time, gamers will have a choice of GPU vendors when buying a raytracing-capable graphics card. Today, we're releasing a new 3DMark feature test that measures pure raytracing performance. You can use the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test to compare the performance of the dedicated raytracing hardware in the latest graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA.

Real-time raytracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that's optimized for raytracing operations. Despite the advances in GPU performance, the demands are still too high for a game to rely on raytracing alone. That's why games use raytracing to complement traditional rendering techniques. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test is designed to make raytracing performance the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass.DOWNLOAD: 3DMark v2.15.7078

Just a few days ago, Intel has decided to surprise us and give out information about its upcoming Rocket Lake-S platform designed for desktop users. Arriving early next year (Q1) the Rocket Lake-S platform is yet another iteration of the company's 14 nm node. However, this time we are getting some real system changes with a new architecture design. Backporting its Golden Cove core to 14 nm, Intel has named this new core type Cypress Cove. What used to be the heart of Ice Lake CPUs, is now powering the Rocket Lake-S platform. Besides the new core, there are other features of the platform like PCIe 4.0, new Xe graphics, and updated media codecs. You can check that out here.

Today, we have gotten the first benchmarks of the Intel Rocket Lake-S system. In the Userbenchmark bench, an unknown eight-core Rocket Lake CPU has been compared to Intel's 10th generation Comet Lake-S processors. The Rocket Lake engineering sample ran at 4.2 GHz while scoring a single-core score of 179. Compared to the Core i9-10900K that runs at 5.3 GHz, which scored 152 points, the Cypress Cove design is 18% faster. And if the new design is compared to the equivalent 8C/16T Compet Lake CPU like Core i7-10700K clocked at 5.1 GHz and scoring 148 points, the new CPU uarch is up to 22% faster. This represents massive single-threaded performance increases, however, please take the information with a grain of salt, as we wait for the official reviews.

Scores for AMD's upcoming Zen 3 Ryzen 7 5800X (8 core, 16 thread) and Ryzen 9 5950X (16 core, 32 thread) have surfaced on the CPU-Z benchmark. The results, which should - as always - be taken with appropriate salt, point towards the Ryzen 7 5800X scoring 650 single-core and 6593 points in the multi-threaded benchmark. The Ryzen 9 5950X is rated as scoring 690.2 points in the same single-threaded benchmark and 13306.5 points in the multi-threaded one. CPU-Z scores for the Intel Core i9-10900K (10 cores, 20 threads) are set at 584 and 7389 points respectively. This is further fuel to the fire on AMD's current technology and performance leadership.

AMD's "Big Navi" GPU is nearing the launch on October 28th, just a few days from now. This means that benchmarks of the card are already appearing across the internet, and we get to see how the card performs. Being divided into two different versions, Big Navi comes in Navi 21 XT and Navi 21 XTX silicon. While the former is available to AMD's AIBs, the latter is rumored to be exclusive to AMD and its reference design, meaning that at least in the beginning, you can only get Navi 21 XTX GPU if you purchase one from AMD directly.

Today, thanks to the Twitter account of CapFrameX, a frame time capturing tool, we have benchmark results of the Big Navi GPU in Firestrike Ultra. According to the people behind this account, the card scores about 11500 points in the benchmark. Compared to NVIDIA's offerings like GeForce RTX 3080, which scores about 10600, the AMD card is 8.5% faster. It is not known whatever this is Navi 21 XT or Navi 21 XTX silicon, however, we can assume that it is the former, and AMD is keeping the XTX revision to themselves for now. This result could be a leak from some of the AIBs, so it could not be the final Big Navi performance. All of this information should be taken with a grain of salt.

Since AMD announced its next-generation Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors based on Zen 3 core, everyone has been wondering how the new processors perform. For a detailed review and performance numbers, you should wait for official reviews. However, today we have the scores of Ryzen 5 5600X CPU. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker @TUM_APISAK, the Ryzen 5 5600X performance numbers in the SiSoftware Sandra benchmark suite have been leaked. When digging under the hood, the new Ryzen CPU contains six of Zen 3 cores with 12 threads, paired with as much as 32 MB of level three (L3) cache. These cores are running at 3.7 GHz base frequency, while the boost speeds are reaching 4.6 GHz.

In the test results, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU has scored Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media scores of 255.22 GOPS and 904.38 Mpix/s. These scores are not much on their own until we compare them to some of the Intel offerings. When compared to the Intel Core i5-10600K CPU, which is likely its targeted competing category, it scores 224.07 GOPS and 662.33 Mpix/s for Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media tests respectively. This puts the AMD CPU ahead 13.9% and 36.5% in these tests, indicating the possibility of Zen 3. Another important note here is the thermal headroom both of these CPUs run. While the Intel model is constrained withing 125 W TDP, the AMD model runs at just 65 W TDP. This could be an indication of the efficiency that these new processors harness.

Basemark is pioneer in GPU benchmarking. Our current product Basemark GPU has been improving the 3D graphics industry since 2016. After releasing GPU 1.2 in March Basemark development team has been really busy developing brand new benchmark - GPUScore. GPUScore benchmark will introduce hyper realistic, true gaming type of content in three different workloads: Relic of Life, Sacret Path and Expedition.

GPUScore Relic of Life is targeted to benchmark high end graphics cards. It is completely new benchmark with many new features. The key new feature is real-time ray traced reflections and reflections of reflections. The benchmark will not only support Windows & DirectX 12, but also Linux & Vulkan raytracing.

AMD in its October 8 online launch event for the Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" processors, provided a teaser of the company's next flagship graphics card slotted in the Radeon RX 6000 series. This particular SKU has been referred to by company CEO Lisa Su as "Big Navi," meaning it could be the top part from AMD's upcoming client GPU lineup. As part of the teaser, Su held up the reference design card, and provided three performance numbers of the card as tested on a machine powered by a Ryzen 9 5900X "Zen 3" processor. We compared these performance numbers, obtained at 4K UHD, with our own testing data for the games, to see how the card compares to other current-gen cards in its class. Our testing data for one of the games is from the latest RTX 30-series reviews, find details of our test bed here. We obviously have a different CPU since the 5900X is unreleased, but use the highest presets in our testing.

With "Borderlands 3" at 4K, with "badass" performance preset and DirectX 12 renderer, AMD claims a frame-rate of 61 FPS. We tested the game with its DirectX 12 renderer in our dedicated performance review (test bed details here). AMD's claimed performance ends up 45.9 percent higher than that of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti as tested by us, which yields 41.8 FPS on our test bed. The RTX 3080 ends up 15.24 percent faster than Big Navi, with 70.3 FPS. It's important to note here that AMD may be using a different/lighter test scene than us, since we don't use internal benchmark tools of games, and design our own test scenes. It's also important to note that we tested Borderlands 3 with DirectX 12 only in the game's launch-day review, and use the DirectX 11 renderer in our regular VGA reviews.

When NVIDIA announced its Ampere lineup of the graphics cards, the A100 GPU was there to represent the higher performance of the lineup. The GPU is optimized for heavy computing workloads as well as machine learning and AI tasks. Today, NVIDIA has submitted the MLPerf results on the A100 GPU to the MLPerf database. What is MLPerf and why it matters you might think? Well, MLPerf is a system benchmark designed to test the capability of a system for machine learning tasks and enable comparability between systems. The A100 GPU got benchmarked in the latest 0.7 version of the benchmark.

The baseline for the results was the previous generation king, V100 Volta GPU. The new A100 GPU is average 1.5 to 2.5 times faster compared to V100. So far A100 GPU system beats all offers available. It is worth pointing out that not all competing systems have been submitted, however, so far the A100 GPU is the fastest.The performance results follow:

Intel is preparing to launch its next-generation for server processors and the next in line is the Ice Lake-SP 10 nm CPU. Featuring a Golden Cove CPU and up to 28 cores, the CPU is set to bring big improvements over the past generation of server products called Cascade Lake. Today, thanks to the sharp eye of TUM_APISAK, we have a new benchmark of the Ice Lake-SP platform, which is compared to AMD's EPYC Rome offerings. In the latest GeekBench 4 score, appeared an engineering sample of unknown Ice Lake-SP model with 28 cores, 56 threads, a base frequency of 1.5 GHz, and a boost of 3.19 GHz.

This model was put in a dual-socket configuration that ends up at a total of 56 core and 112 threads, against a single 64 core AMD EPYC 7442 Rome CPU. The dual-socket Intel configuration scored 3424 points in the single-threaded test, where AMD configuration scored notably higher 4398 points. The lower score on Intel's part is possibly due to lower clocks, which should improve in the final product, as this is only an engineering sample. When it comes to the multi-threaded test, Intel configuration scored 38079 points, where the AMD EPYC system did worse and scored 35492 points. The reason for this higher result is unknown, however, it shows that Ice Lake-SP has some potential.

When NVIDIA introduced its Ampere A100 GPU, it was said to be the company's fastest creation yet. However, we didn't know how fast the GPU exactly is. With the whopping 6912 CUDA cores, the GPU can pack all that on a 7 nm die with 54 billion transistors. Paired with 40 GB of super-fast HBM2E memory with a bandwidth of 1555 GB/s, the GPU is set to be a good performer. And how fast it exactly is you might wonder? Well, thanks to the Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY, a software developer and maker of OctaneRender software, we have the first benchmark of the Ampere A100 GPU.

Scoring 446 points in OctaneBench, a benchmark for OctaneRender, the Ampere GPU takes the crown of the world's fastest GPU. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU scores 302 points, which makes the A100 GPU up to 47.7% faster than Turing. However, the fastest Turing card found in the benchmark database is the Quadro RTX 8000, which scored 328 points, showing that Turing is still holding well. The result of Ampere A100 was running with RTX turned off, which could yield additional performance if RTX was turned on and that part of the silicon started working.

AMD Ryzen 4000 series of desktop APUs are set to be released next month as a quiet launch. What we expected to see is a launch covering only a few models ranging from Ryzen 3 to Ryzen 7 level, meaning that there would be configurations equipped with anything from 4C/8T to 8C/16T. In the beginning thanks to all the leaks we expected to see six models (listed in the table below), however thanks to discovery, we could be looking at even more SKUs of the Renoir family of APUs. Mentioned in the table are some new entries to both consumer and pro-grade users which means AMD will probably do a launch of both editions, possibly on the same day. We are not sure if that is the case, however, it is just a speculation.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 3800XT 8-core/16-thread processor was put through "Ashes of the Singularity" (AotS) benchmark, as uncovered by HardwareLeaks (_rogame). Paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card, the processor is able to put out CPU frame-rates of 113.2 FPS (averaging all batches); 135.9 FPS in the normal batch, 115.31 FPS in the medium batch, and 95.49 FPS in the heavy batch, with preset level set to "Crazy_1080p." An older article points to the 3800XT ticking at 4.20 GHz base with 4.70 GHz maximum boost (compared to 3.90 GHz base and 4.50 GHz boost of the 3800X), which means AMD aims to shore up gaming performance of its 3rd gen Ryzen processors with the XT series.

Renowned leaker APISAK has digged up benchmarks for AMD's upcoming Ryzen 4700G, 4400G and 4200G Renoir APUs in 3D Mark. These are actually for the PRO versions of the APUs, but these tend to be directly comparable with AMD's non-PRO offerings, so we can look at them to get an idea of where AMD's 4000G series' performance lies. AMD's 4000G will be increasing core-counts almost across the board - the midrange 4400G now sports 6 cores and 12 threads, which is more than the previous generation Ryzen 5 3400G offered (4 cores / 8 threads), while the top-of-the-line 4700G doubles the 3400G's core-cpount to 8 physical and 16 logical threads.

This increase in CPU cores, of course, has implied a reduction in the area of the chip that's dedicated to the integrated Vega graphics GPU - compute units have been reduced from the 3400G's 11 down to 8 compute units on the Ryzen 7 4700G and 7 compute units on the 4400G - while the 4200G now makes do with just 6 Vega compute units. Clocks have been severely increased across the board to compensate the CU reduction, though - the aim is to achieve similar GPU performance using a smaller amount of semiconductor real-estate.

Crytek today released the final build for their hardware-agnostic raytracing benchmark. Dubbed Neon Noir, the benchmark had already been showcased in video form back in March 2019, but now it's finally available for download for all interested parties from the Crytek Marketplace. The benchmark currently doesn't support any low-level API such as Vulkan or DX 12, but support for those - and the expected performance improvements - will be implemented in the future.

Neon Noir has its raytracing chops added via an extension of CRYENGINE's SVOGI rendering tool that currently Crytek's games use, including Hunt: Showdown, which will make it easier for developers to explore raytracing implementations that don't require a particular hardware implementation (such as RTX). However, the developer has added that they will add hardware acceleration support in the future, which should only improve performance, and will not add any additional rendering features compared to those that can be achieved already. What are you waiting for? Just follow the link below.