A Hammer for 3D Rendering Applications

If anything could showcase Skulltrail's performance potential it is our 3D rendering benchmarks.

3dsmax r9

3dsmax has always been very well threaded and thus scaling from 4 to 8 cores is guaranteed. Our benchmark, as always, is the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 test but for the purpose of this article we only run the CPU rendering tests and not the GPU tests.

The results are reported as render times in seconds and the final CPU composite score is a weighted geometric mean of all of the test scores.

Scaling from 4 to 8 cores is pretty impressive at just under 40%. You'll also see that the desktop QX9770 is faster than a single QX9775 thanks to the lower latency unbuffered DDR2 memory.

Lightwave 3D 09

Lightwave is another 3D rendering application that we've used from time to time as a benchmark. We used two scenes that come with the application to measure performance: Dirty Building and Old Record Player. We simply rendered the scenes using all available cores, Image Viewer was disabled during the render process.

We continue to see good scaling in Lightwave, approaching 40% from 4 to 8 cores. A single QX9775 continues to be slightly slower than a QX9770 due to the use of FB-DIMMs.

Cinebench R10

A benchmarking favorite, Cinebench R10 is designed to give us an indication of performance in the Cinema 4D rendering application.

Cinebench is the poster child for 8 core performance: we're looking at a greater than 60% increase in performance when going from 4 to 8 cores. This sort of performance can't be achieved with raw clock speed, you need more cores.

POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 24

POV-Ray is a popular raytracer, also available with a built in benchmark. We used the 3.7 beta which has SMP support and ran the built in multithreaded benchmark.

POV-Ray shows almost perfect scaling with the move to 8 cores, there's over a 90% increase in performance from a single to quad QX9775 setup.