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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Einy0 - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Ian, I stand corrected and apologize. I think I allowed a previous poster's anger affect my thoughts on the subject. I'm still very confused as to why you would not publish results on both platforms while including a note in regards to gaming performance. Not that these chips are for gaming but many of us use our PCs as an all purpose computing platform and gaming is frequently included in the mix.Ryan Smith - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
"I'm still very confused as to why you would not publish results on both platforms while including a note in regards to gaming performance. "1) Lack of time. The most recent BIOS update came close to the launch, and we haven't yet had enough time to fully validate all of our data.
2) Right now gaming performance is all over the place. And with Intel doing pre-orders, by the time you got your chips there's a good chance there will be another BIOS revision that significantly alters gaming performance.
Gothmoth - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
the whole article feels rushed to be honest.there is basically no talk about the insane powerdraw and temps when overclocked.
jardows2 - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Let me give you the conclusion ahead of time. If you are buying a gaming chip, buy the i7-7700K.These are not gaming chips, they are work chips that can do gaming. It's like buying a 1-ton diesel truck, and wanting to floor it at the stoplight. It'll do it, but a Mustang or Camaro will do that better. The truck will be able to haul pretty much anything, that the pony cars will blow their transmissions on.
Ryzen, on the other hand, is all AMD has, and so gaming results are very relevant to the discussion.
prophet001 - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
^ ThisHurr Durr - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
I`d rather wait for the next iteration, whatever Lake that was. Hopefully 6 cores will step down into the mainstream, and then there is 10 nm.koomba - Thursday, July 6, 2017 - link
How.many.times.does.it.have.to.be.said? They did NOT post gaming benchmarks on their first Ryzen review either! You are seriously at least the 10th person who has come on here spouting this COMPLETE falsehood, and using it to bash this site or claim some kind of bias.Please do some research before you just talk nonsense and base your entire argument around something that isn't true.
Gasaraki88 - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Thank you for this article. I knew I could count on Anandtech to write a detailed article on the new Intel cpus, how everything on them worked, like the caches and turbo core 3.0, etc. not just benches.marcis_mk - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Ryzen R7 1700 has 24 pci-e lanes (20 for PCI-E dGPU and 4 for storage)Ian Cutress - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
AMD has a tendency to quote the sum of all PCIe. We specifically state the PCIe root complex based lanes for GPUs. Ryzen has 16 + 4 + 4 - root complex, chipset, IO. Threadripper has 60 + 4: root complex(es) and chipset. Skylake-S has 16 + 4 - root complex, DMI/chipset. Etc.