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.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Corona 1.3: link

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.

Rendering: Corona Photorealism

Corona loves threads.

Blender 2.78: link

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.

Rendering: Blender 2.78

Blender loves threads and memory bandwidth.

LuxMark v3.1: Link

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.

Rendering: LuxMark CPU C++Rendering: LuxMark CPU OpenCL

Like Blender, LuxMark is all about the thread count. Ray tracing is very nearly a textbook case for easy multi-threaded scaling. Though it's interesting just how close the 10-core Core i9-7900X gets in the CPU (C++) test despite a significant core count disadvantage, likely due to a combination of higher IPC and clockspeeds.

POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link

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.

Rendering: POV-Ray 3.7

Similar to LuxMark, POV-Ray also wins on account of threads.

Cinebench R15: link

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.

Rendering: CineBench 15 MultiThreaded

Rendering: CineBench 15 SingleThreaded

Intel recently announced that its new 18-core chip scores 3200 on Cinebench R15. That would be an extra 6.7% performance over the Threadripper 1950X for 2x the cost.

Benchmarking Performance: CPU System Tests Benchmarking Performance: CPU Web Tests
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  • Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    A single 1950X destroyed 80% of the intel xeon lineup.
  • Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Any cpu after nehalem perform enough at single thread except for software optimized too much for certain brands, like dolphin and intel.
  • Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Specially when every cpu right now autoclocks to 4Ghz on ST tasks. Single thread is just an obsolete metric when just the most basic of tasks will use it, tasks the last thing you will worry is speed, maybe curse about that piece of c*rap not using 80% of you cpu resources.
  • ZeroPointEF - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    I would love to see more VM benchmarking on these types of CPUs. I would also love to see how a desktop performs on top of a Server 2016 hypervisor with multiple servers (Windows and Linux) running on top of the same hypervisor.
  • ZeroPointEF - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    I should have made it clear that I loved the review. Ian's reviews are always great!

    I would just like to see these types of things in addition. It seems like we are getting to a point where we can have our own home lab and a desktop all on one machine on top of a hypervisor, but this idea may be my own strange dream.
  • smilingcrow - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    And others would like to know how it works at video editing or as a DAW etc.
    To add a whole bunch of demanding benchmarks just for HEDT systems is a hell of a lot of work for little return for a site whose main focus is the mainstream.
    Try looking at more specialised reviews.
  • johnnycanadian - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    This, please! My TR purchase is hinging on the performance of multiple VMWare VMs all running full-out at least 18 hours per day.

    Ian, I'd love to see some of your compute-intensive multi-core benches running on a Linux host with Linux-based VMWare VMs (OpenCV analysis, anyone? Send me that 1950x and I'll happily run SIFT and SURF analysis all day long for you :-). I was delighted by the non-gaming benchmarks shown first in this review and hope to see more professional benches on Anand. Leave the gamerkids to Tom's or HardOCP (or at least limit gaming benchmarks to hardware that is built for it): Anandtech has always been more about folks who make their living on HPDC, and I have nothing but the highest respect for the technical staff at this publication.

    I don't give a monkey's about RGB lighting, tempered glass cases, 4k gaming or GTAV FPS. How machines like Threadripper perform in a HPC environment is going to keep AMD in this market, and I sincerely hope they prove to be viable.
  • mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Yes, I was pleased to see the non-gaming tests presented first, makes a change, and at least a subtle nod to the larger intended market for TR.

    Ian.
  • pm9819 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link

    Your going to spend a $1000 on cpu but have no clue how it handles the tasks you need it for, smh. As a VMWare customer they will tell you which cpu has been certified to handle a specific tasked. You don't need a random website to tell you that.
  • nitin213 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Hi Ian
    It's a great review but i do have some suggestions on the test suite. The test suite for this CPU was not materially different from test suites of many of the other desktop CPUs done earlier. I think it would be great to see some tests which explicitly put to use the multi-threaded capabilities and the insane IOs of the system to test, e.g server hosting with how many users being able to login, virtual machines, more productivity test suites when put together with a multi-GPU setup (running adobe creator or similar) etc. I think a combination of your epyc test suite and your high-end GPU test suite would probably be best suited for this.

    Also, for the gaming benchmark, it seemed you had 1080, 1060, rx580 and rx480 GPUs. Not sure if these were being bottlenecked by GPU with differences in framerates being semantic and not necessarily a show of PC strength. Also, Civ 6 AI test suite would a great addition as that really stresses the CPU.

    i completely understand that there is only so much that can be done in a limited timeframe typically made available for these reviews but would be great to see these tests in future iterations and updates.

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