You might not know it, but Umbra is a major component of most popular video games that you play. It is a graphical rendering middleware, that is built into Unity, and is supported as a plug in in Unreal Engine 4, and it has already been used in some games you are probably already deeply familiar with, such as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Destiny, and the upcoming The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

A new version for the technology has been announced today, which should promise even more significant leaps and improvements in game graphics. The new version comes with the Umbra Cloud, which can perform graphical computations and calculations remotely, with the Umbra runtime then processing the data from the cloud as if it were running locally- bringing the potential of the cloud with the convenience of local rendering.

Jani Joki, Director of Engineering at Futuremark, said, “With Umbra Cloud, we have access to a cost-effective and extremely scalable computation infrastructure with zero setup effort. It has accelerated our work-flow as we develop our next generation of 3DMark benchmark tests.”

Umbra Cloud will be made available to all existing customers (the developers, you don’t need to worry about it), and it should help streamline their game development process a lot, especially for online titles.

This new OpenGL ES 2.0 benchmark has been designed and uses fixed off-screen rendering 720p resolution. It then scales the output to fit the display native resolution. Ice Storm is also equipped to stress GPU performance and uses a physics test to stress the CPU.

Ice Storm Extreme, on the other hand, puts the rendering resolution at 1080p and utilizes high quality textures and post processing effects. Currently, the OUYA ranks at #71 among Android devices for performance in Ice Storm Extreme.

3DMark is cross-platform, so it can also be used to test the capability of graphics in iOS and Windows/Windows RT devices as well (which are to be released soon). Pick up the app at the Google Play Store here.