The Dark Knight: Intel's Core i7
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on November 3, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3D Rendering Performance
Our first 3D rendering test is POV-Ray 37 beta 29 and its SMP benchmark, the performance is measured in ray traced pixels per second:
As we've already seen, Nehalem's multi-threaded 3D rendering performance is absolutely insane - the $284 Core i7-920 is faster than the $1400 Core 2 Extreme QX9770.
Next up we have Cinebench with both its single and multi-threaded rendering tests:
Nehalem's single-threaded performance is still improved over Penryn, here we're seeing a 13.7% increase in performance at 3.2GHz.
Toss more threads at the i7 and the performance boost jumps to 34%, once again the i7-920 is faster than the QX9770.
Our final 3D rendering benchmark is the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 CPU rendering test run on 3dsmax 9:
That's another 30%+ advantage for Nehalem. If you do a lot of 3D rendering on your system, Intel is going to give you $1400 worth of performance for $284. Merry Christmas.
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Jingato - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
If the 920 can easily be overclocked to 3.8Ghz on air, what intensive is there to purchase the 965 for more that triple the price?TantrumusMaximus - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
I don't understand why the tests were on such low resolutions... most gamers are running higher res than 1280x1024 etc etc....What gives?
daniyarm - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Because if they ran gaming benchmarks at higher res, the difference in FPS would be hardly visible and you wouldn't go out and buy a new CPU.If they are going to show differences between Intel and AMD CPUs, show Nehalem at 3.2 GHz vs 9950 OC to 3.2 GHz so we can see clock for clock differences in performance and power.
npp - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
9950 consumes about 30W more at idle than the 965XE, and 30W less under load. I guess that OC'ing it to 3,2Ghz will need more than 30W... Given that the 965 can process 4 more threads, I think the result should be more or less clear.tim851 - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Higher resolutions stress the GPU more and it will become a bottleneck. Since the article was focussing on CPU power and not GPU power they were lowering the resolution enough to effectively take the GPU out of the picture.Caveman - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
It would be nice to see these CPU reviews use relevant "gaming" benchmarks. It would be good to see the results with something like MS flight simulator FSX or DCS Black Shark, etc... The flight simulators these days are BOTH graphically and calculation intensive, but really stress the CPU.AssBall - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
No, they don't, actually.philosofool - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
It would have been nice to see a proper comparison of power consumption. Given all of Intel's boast about being able to shut off cores to save power, I'd like to see some figures about exact savings.nowayout99 - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Ditto, I was wondering about power too.Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Soon, soon my friend :)-A