Soft shadows. A raster load calibrated to the card in front of it.
A real-time soft-shadow raster load, lighter than path tracing and suited to mid-range and integrated graphics.
Illustrative frame times. Not a measurement.
Render mode
PCSS soft shadows
Load type
Moderate compute
Duration
50 seconds
Reports
Frame time + pacing + decay
It finds the ceiling, then holds it.
Rather than throwing a fixed scene at every card, a controller raises the load until the frame budget is reached, records the ceiling, then holds just under it to see what the card sustains.
A 33 ms budget
A lit scene renders on a slow camera orbit. Every 350 ms a controller takes the median of the last 30 frame times and compares it against a 33 millisecond budget.
Supersampling ramps
Below 80% of budget the controller raises an internal supersampling factor by 8%, up to a cap of 1.6. Above budget it cuts the factor by 6%, down to a floor of 0.5. The highest factor reached is the ceiling.
Held at 92% of the ceiling
Past 55% of the 38-second run the factor is pinned at 92% of the ceiling and held for the sustained phase. That is where decay and stability are read.
A pressure index, not a pixel count
The render target is sized once and not resized mid-run, so the supersampling factor drives the reported work figure arithmetically. Raster work per second is a derived pressure index.
Frame time, pacing, and how far it falls.
Speed and smoothness are different things, and a single average hides the difference. The stage reports both, and reports how much of the opening output the card kept.
Frame time
The median time to render a frame, in milliseconds, against the 33 ms budget the controller works to. Lower is faster; the budget line is where the controller stops pushing.
Stability
The share of the last 40 controller windows whose median frame time stayed inside the 33 ms budget. A card that hits its budget most of the time but stutters scores lower than its average frame time would suggest.
Decay
Mean frame rate between 20% and 45% of the run compared against the mean after 75%. Floored at zero; a card that speeds up reports 0% decay rather than a negative number.
What the VRAM badge is
The pressure label shown during the stage is computed from median frame time only. It is a load label, not a memory reading. No browser API exposes video memory.
Illustrative frame times. Not a measurement.
Hardware
What it needs. Three tiers, no fine print.
Minimum
GTX 750 / HD 7850
Completes the run at a low ceiling. The figures are still a measurement of that card.
Recommended
GTX 1050 / RX 560
Reaches a comfortable ceiling with headroom for the sustained phase to mean something.
Optimal
Any modern dedicated GPU
Will hit the 1.6 supersampling cap. Stability and decay are then the interesting figures.
Questions
Soft shadows, answered
- What are soft shadows in rendering?
- Soft shadows have gradual edges instead of sharp outlines, mimicking real-world lighting where light sources have physical size and spread.
- Why are soft shadows more expensive to render?
- Producing a soft penumbra requires sampling a light's area and blurring the result per pixel, which multiplies the shading work compared to hard shadows.
- How do soft shadows differ from ray-traced shadows?
- PCSS approximates soft shadows in a rasterized pipeline using shadow-map sampling, while ray-traced shadows trace rays to the light. PCSS is far cheaper and runs on older hardware.
- Is this test suitable for integrated graphics?
- Yes. It is a moderate workload designed to remain stable on most hardware, including integrated GPUs, making it a good baseline before the heavier path-tracing stage.