The Intel Core i9-9900KS Review: The 5 GHz Consumer Special
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 31, 2019 10:45 AM ESTCPU Performance: Rendering Tests
Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: Performance Render
An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.
We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.
The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark
Interestingly both 9900KS settings performed slightly worse than the 9900K here, which you wouldn't expect given the all-core turbo being higher. It would appear that there is something else the bottleneck in this test.
Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/
All the 9900 parts and settings perform roughly the same with one another, however the PL2 255W setting on the 9900KS does allow it to get a small ~5% advantage over the standard 9900K.
LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths
As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs.
In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.
Both 9900KS settings perform equally well here, and a sizeable jump over the standard 9900K.
POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing
The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/
One of the biggest differences between the two power settings is in POV-Ray, with a marked frequency difference. In fact, the 159W setting on the 9900KS puts it below our standard settings for the 9900K, which likely had an big default turbo budget on the board it was on at the time.
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liquid_c - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
One of the few reasons i keep reading articles from sites / news outlets like Anandtech and ArsTechnica is the fact that besides good, well developed and portrayed journalism, i also expect knowledgeable people commenting on said articles. I always learn(ed) a little bit of extra info by doing so and it pains me to see this ongoing fan war between Intel / AMD fans, Apple / *Insert any other Android vendor name* fans, etc. So instead of finding out the “ifs” and “whens” of specific tech topics, i have to skip through countless hate posts.PeachNCream - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
People in glass houses.... liquid_c - Sunday, November 03, 2019 - Stop being such a dummy and stop acting like a rabid dog over a product that not only you will never get but clearly, it's not geared towards you.Although I agree in principal that there are a fair number of toxic comments, yours are among them so I don't think you have much room to complain while at the same time contributing to the problem.
sorten - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
The 65W 3700X is the star of this show.shompa - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
The main problem is: 16 PCI lanes. You can't really connect anything to the system without starving it for bandwidth. The 16 PCI lanes are used for graphics. DMI link to the motherboards PCI lanes has a bandwidth of 3.8GB/s. 4-year-old NVme SSDs are already at 3.5GB/s. Forget using 2 NVme. Usually, the graphics card is pushed to 8PCI lanes killing 10% performance. Forget connecting fun stuff with a thunderbolt, or use high-end capture cards and so on. There is no bandwidth. AMD Ryzen 3 with X570 is a bit better: 24 PCI lanes. 16 for PCI and 2x4 for dual NVme SSD with 8GB/s support.trojtalen - Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - link
Really? In FarCry i missing Ryzen 3000 generation, why?...Sorry but in Vulkan (Strange Brigade) its shame! 65W AMD beat 250W+ intel on 5GHz? :D:D:D LOLalufan - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
so this has been the main front page story on this site for the last 8 Days strikes me as a little biased other CPUs come and go yet intels last gasp attempt to make something matter is upfront and centre for over a week strikes me as a little unfairjonbar - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
So.... În other review, Ryzen slaughtered 9900ks in blender, even 3700x is faster :)Some say in gaming it's faster than 3900x, but so is 9700k with 2080 :) 9700k is on par with 9900ks.
Other than "having the best of the best", 9900ks requires a lot more spending to open it's full potential. From this review, 3700x is really, really good all-round with minimal spending a 100$ B450 and a good 550w psu
Maxiking - Thursday, November 7, 2019 - link
Any Ryzen CPU is getting slaughtered in gaming by piss poor 9700k without HT so your point? Don't hate things just because you are too poor to afford them. We rich bois don't care. Don't forget to attend Fridays for future today.jonbar - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
:) how could you live a day without insults.People asked why no ryzen 3000 results for blender, and slaughters is when a 127W-rated, "special edition" "all cores 5GHz all times", 550$+ CPU doesn't even manage to beat the 3700X at 325$.
People also asked why 1080 and argued that 9900ks is still better for gaming, guess what - on a 2080, de difference is not so great, other than Hitman, 9700k (piss poor? I suppose rich boys don't know that it, at the moment, is 30$ more expensive than 3700x, with no cooler AND requires the Z mobo to overclock :)
Maxiking - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
Yeah, I am asking too why that allegedly excellent 7nm cpu with HT is unable to beat a piss poor 14nm 9700k with HT disabled? See, there is a reason why it is so cheap.Yes, it is a piss poor version of 9900k with disabled HT, the silicone quality is subpar by Intel high standards and those pieces are unable to reach 5ghz boosts with HT being enabled , so Intel disabled the HT and sell them as 9700k. Of course, I should not forget to mention that 9700k is a piss poor quality cpu only by the high Intel standards and high Intel customers standards.. We do not bother with anything below 4.7 Ghz.
By AMD standards, anything reaching 4.0 is a godly cpu and is being binned and sold as 3900x for the premium and they are pumping up to 1.55v into it so it can reach that mighty 4.3ghz boost on a single core whilst they promised 4.6ghz.
Let's wait for 3950x and the promised 4.7ghz boost. You know, I smell a trap. Not that kind of one, you pervert. 3900x is able to reach 4.6ghz for microseconds so, that 4.7ghz boost won't be most likely even measurable because such tiny time unit the boost would be active for hasn't been discovered yet.