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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zlandar - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Glad AMD is lighting a fire under Intel's complacent butt.SaolDan - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Can these chips be overclocked? If so can we get some charts? This is my go to site for tech.Despoiler - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
According to Tom's these things are dogs. AIOs can only handle stock frequencies and Prime95 runs.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-...
Archie2085 - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
@ Ryan @ IanHow Come no one is talking about the Power Draw or Performance Per Watt per $$. If that is the Metric Looks Like AMD has a winner achieving 80% Results with a 8 Core Processor Against 10 Core Giants Not to mention at a Fraction of Cost
The Release under such a tearing Hurry Definitely looks like a Knee Jerk Reaction of Zen and Impending Release of Thread Ripper...
I would Expect you to Give a proper review of Thread ripper just as you have not Made any Meaningful mention of it in this article even though Performance leaks have started...
Looks More Like a Marketing Article than a Review of Pros and Cons.
BrokenCrayons - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
What's with the odd capitalizations?FreckledTrout - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
I'm not sure how much Performance Per Watt comes into play here but it should at least some. Mostly in the workstation and desktop market its price vs performance. The data center CPU's performance per watt is what it is all about and Intel is in for some trouble if this is a trend that continues into the data center CPU's. AMD may really have some pretty good CPU's in thread ripper and EPYC.Archie2085 - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
HEDT practically is a workstation chip used for workstations. For Freelancers cost Vs extracted value should have a bearing on the choiceFreckledTrout - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
No argument that is what I was hinting at wen I said price vs performance. The perf vs power draw ins't top of most workstation users lists, it is mostly how much do I pay for this nn percent improvement in rendering times for example. The performance per watt doesn't matter to to many outside of data centers, well it matters to everyone, but to a much larger degree in data centers.GeorgeH - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Thanks for the review. I generally enjoy your perspective, and try to remember to support you by using a browser with no ad blocking, but have to say your website is almost unusable using Microsoft Edge because of the ads (on my ultrabook with an i5-5300u). I had to switch to an ad blocking browser mid stream to actually read your content, which isn't good for anyone.Silma - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
I was disappointed to find no information on overcloackability, or did I read too fast.I would expect a lesser overcloackability since the frequency & TDP are already pushed.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong.