When it comes to measuring GPU performance in a more objective way, there are few benchmarks out there that can rival 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme test. It’s one of the few cross-platform GPU benchmarks that works across a multitude of devices, and it’s a pretty intensive test too. How it works exactly is a mystery to many, though.
What is 3DMark? What is Wild Life Extreme?
3DMark is a benchmarking tool that runs on Android, iOS, and Windows and aims to measure the performance of the device you’re testing relative to others. It’s primarily aimed at testing 3D graphics rendering but can also analyze compute workloads. The scores received can be used to directly compare to other devices in order to establish a computational capability hierarchy.
3DMark packs a lot of different tests, but Wild Life and Wild Life Extreme are two cross-platform tests that can be used to compare smartphones directly to a computer, for example. 3DMark is available on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
What platforms does 3DMark Wild Life Extreme support?
3DMark’s Wild Life extreme supports the following platforms and hardware, and it runs the following workload.
| Benchmark | 3DMark Wild Life |
| Platforms | Android, iOS, Windows |
| Target hardware | Windows notebook PCs Always Connected PCs powered by Arm Apple Mac computers with the M1 chip Next-generation smartphones and tablets |
| Workload | Graphics Test measures GPU performance |
| Graphics API | Vulkan 1.1 (Android, Windows) DirectX 12 feature level 11 (Windows 10 on Arm) Metal (iOS) |
| Rendering resolution | 3840×2160 (4K UHD) |
How does 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme test work?
Wild Life Extreme runs for one minute rendering multiple 4K scenes, and it simulates games that have high-intensity bursts of activity. It uses the Vulkan API on Android and Windows, Direct X 12 feature level 11 on Windows on Arm, and Metal on iOS.
A stress test can also be run to simulate a longer workload. It will loop the same test for 20 minutes, measuring the decrease in performance with each loop to show how a device can thermally throttle over time. A chart is also produced to show the decline in performance so that you can better understand your device’s capabilities.
Wild Life Extreme is based on 3DMark’s Wild Life test but with additional changes that make it more intensive to run. Wild Life consists of multiple scenes with variations in geometry, lights, and post-processing effects such as bloom, heat distortion, volume illumination, and depth of field. It uses a deferred renderer with clustered light culling, an optimization technique that many modern games would make use of.
These scenes also utilize transparent geometry to form clouds, dust, and bright self-illuminated particles. The main light source is a shadowed directional light with unshadowed omnidirectional lights used too, and a single non-shadowed frustum light is used in a few scenes.
As for Wild Life Extreme, there are a couple of key differences. It increases the rendering resolution from 1440p to 4K, and it adds adaptive screen space ambient occlusion and temporal anti-aliasing. It makes use of asynchronous compute to overlap rendering passes in order to maximize the utilization of the GPU. Finally, It makes the following workload changes over the regular Wild Life test:
- Increased maximum anisotropy for anisotropic filtering of material textures
- Increased shadow map resolution
- Increased shadow map sample count
- Increased volume illumination sample count
- Higher-resolution bloom effect
- Increased geometry load by roughly 25% in every scene
- Increase particle load by doubling the number of particles
How to download 3DMark Wild Life Extreme
3DMark is one of the go-to benchmarks that people use to test devices like the best phones, laptops, and tablets, and you can download the Wild Life Extreme test from the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, and the 3DMark website.