The Intel Skylake-X Review: Core i9 7900X, i7 7820X and i7 7800X Tested
by Ian Cutress on June 19, 2017 9:01 AM ESTBenchmarking Performance: CPU Rendering Tests
Rendering tests are a long-time favorite of reviewers and benchmarkers, as the code used by rendering packages is usually highly optimized to squeeze every little bit of performance out. Sometimes rendering programs end up being heavily memory dependent as well - when you have that many threads flying about with a ton of data, having low latency memory can be key to everything. Here we take a few of the usual rendering packages under Windows 10, as well as a few new interesting benchmarks.
Corona 1.3
Corona is a standalone package designed to assist software like 3ds Max and Maya with photorealism via ray tracing. It's simple - shoot rays, get pixels. OK, it's more complicated than that, but the benchmark renders a fixed scene six times and offers results in terms of time and rays per second. The official benchmark tables list user submitted results in terms of time, however I feel rays per second is a better metric (in general, scores where higher is better seem to be easier to explain anyway). Corona likes to pile on the threads, so the results end up being very staggered based on thread count.
Blender 2.78
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
LuxMark
As a synthetic, LuxMark might come across as somewhat arbitrary as a renderer, given that it's mainly used to test GPUs, but it does offer both an OpenCL and a standard C++ mode. In this instance, aside from seeing the comparison in each coding mode for cores and IPC, we also get to see the difference in performance moving from a C++ based code-stack to an OpenCL one with a CPU as the main host.
POV-Ray 3.7b3
Another regular benchmark in most suites, POV-Ray is another ray-tracer but has been around for many years. It just so happens that during the run up to AMD's Ryzen launch, the code base started to get active again with developers making changes to the code and pushing out updates. Our version and benchmarking started just before that was happening, but given time we will see where the POV-Ray code ends up and adjust in due course.
Cinebench R15
The latest version of CineBench has also become one of those 'used everywhere' benchmarks, particularly as an indicator of single thread performance. High IPC and high frequency gives performance in ST, whereas having good scaling and many cores is where the MT test wins out.
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Gothmoth - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
shoody performance.. what are you talking about? stupid games?bios updates will fix that.
could not care less about games. but the intels are faster.. no way around it.
more pricey but faster.
Flying Aardvark - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
You nailed it. Between the temps and power draw, to jump on this lineup is really silly. I like the 1700 for a small air cooled mITX setup. If I moved to anything else I'd dump all this stuff in the middle and go straight to Threadripper.If you're going for thread count, do it right and get 16C/32T. Or just stick to a nice cool and quiet R5 or R7.
cocochanel - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
How do they get stomped ? AMD power consumption is about half of that of Intel's.Can you please explain ?
Yongsta - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Wow, comparing $1000+ high end enthusiast desktop parts vs $500 and lower consumer desktop parts. Wait for Threadripper and Ryzen7 right now offers a lot more bang for the buck (if you get the 1700 and overclock it).tarqsharq - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Those multi-threaded benchmarks are going to get really ugly for Intel in a few months I think, especially from a bang for buck perspective.T1beriu - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Wrong name: derba8urReal name: der8auer
Page 6.
Ryan Smith - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Thanks!jjj - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
A lot of talk about the mesh but not testing it, at least the basic memory BW, latency and scaling.No power numbers at all? No OC and temps....
Why focus on perf and ignore all else when perf is more or less a known quantity and the unanswered questions are elsewhere.
For Intel you list all Turbo flavors, for AMD you forget XFR when comparing SKUs.
Luckz - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-... has you covered re the meshjjj - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
PCPer tries to look at it too.