The Cloud Gate workload is meant for notebooks and typical home PCs, and uses DirectX 11 (feature level 10) to render frames at 1280 x 720. The graphs below present the various Ice Storm worloads' numbers for different systems that we have evaluated. While the Extreme renders at 1920 x 1080, the other two render at 1280 x 720. All three use DirectX 11 (feature level 9) / OpenGL ES 2.0. It is a cross-platform benchmark (which means that the scores can be compared across different tablets and smartphones as well). This workload has three levels of varying complexity - the vanilla Ice Storm, Ice Storm Unlimited, and Ice Storm Extreme. In this section, we take a look at the performance of the Intel NUC11BTMi9 (Beast Canyon) across the different 3DMark workloads. We use 3DMark to get an idea of the graphics capabilities of the system. Correspondingly, the rendering resolutions are also different. UL's 3DMark comes with a diverse set of graphics workloads that target different Direct3D feature levels. The power plan was set to Balanced for all the PCs while processing the PCMark 10 benchmark. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU and GPU in the system, though the RAM and storage device also play a part. We benchmarked select PCs with the PCMark 10 Extended profile and recorded the scores for various scenarios. UL's PCMark 10 evaluates computing systems for various usage scenarios (generic / essential tasks such as web browsing and starting up applications, productivity tasks such as editing spreadsheets and documents, gaming, and digital content creation).
While PCMark evaluates the system as a whole, 3DMark focuses on the graphics capabilities with emphasis on gaming workloads. This section deals with a couple of UL Futuremark benchmarks - PCMark 10 and 3DMark.