The CPU Test measures processor performance. It is designed to stress the CPU while minimizing GPU load to ensure that GPU performance is not a limiting factor.

The Night Raid CPU Test features a combination of physics computations and custom simulations. 

The simulations require visualization, which can make rendering a bottleneck in some cases. To avoid this, the test only measures the time taken to complete the simulation work. The rendering work in each frame is done before the simulation and doesn’t affect the score.

The result of the test is the average simulation time per frame reported in milliseconds. A lower number means better performance.

CPU instruction sets

On Windows 10 devices, half of the boids systems in the Night Raid CPU Test use advanced CPU instruction sets, up to AVX2, if supported. The remaining half use the SSSE3 code path. This split makes the test more realistic since games typically have several types of simulation or similar tasks running at once and would be unlikely to use a single instruction set for all of them.

On devices powered by Windows 10 on Arm, the CPU Test always uses the NEON instruction set.

Custom run

With Custom run settings, you can choose which CPU instruction set to use, up to AVX512. The selected set will be used for all boids systems, provided it is supported by the processor under test.

You can evaluate the performance gains of different instruction sets by comparing custom run scores. Note that the choice of set does not affect the physics simulations, which always use SSSE3 and are 15-30% of the workload.

This setting is not available on devices powered by Windows 10 on Arm.