The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10600K CPU Review: Skylake We Go Again
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 20, 2020 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Skylake
- 14nm
- Z490
- 10th Gen Core
- Comet Lake
CPU 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.
Crysis CPU Render
One of the most oft used memes in computer gaming is ‘Can It Run Crysis?’. The original 2007 game, built in the Crytek engine by Crytek, was heralded as a computationally complex title for the hardware at the time and several years after, suggesting that a user needed graphics hardware from the future in order to run it. Fast forward over a decade, and the game runs fairly easily on modern GPUs, but we can also apply the same concept to pure CPU rendering – can the CPU render Crysis? Since 64 core processors entered the market, one can dream. We built a benchmark to see whether the hardware can.
For this test, we’re running Crysis’ own GPU benchmark, but in CPU render mode. This is a 2000 frame test, which we run over a series of resolutions from 800x600 up to 1920x1080. For simplicity, we provide the 1080p test here.
This is one of our new benchmarks, so we are slowly building up the database as we start regression testing older processors.
The Core i9-10900K scores 15 FPS at 800x600, which is just about playable.
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
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/
V-Ray
We have a couple of renderers and ray tracers in our suite already, however V-Ray’s benchmark came through for a requested benchmark enough for us to roll it into our suite. We run the standard standalone benchmark application, but in an automated fashion to pull out the result in the form of kilosamples/second. We run the test six times and take an average of the valid results.
This is another one of our recently added tests.
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/
Interestingly the Core i9 with only 10C outperforms the 12C Ryzen 9 3900X here, likely due to the higher sustained frequency of the Intel chip. We clocked 220W on our Intel chip for this test however, well beyond the 120W of the AMD processor.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
220 Comments
View All Comments
ByteMag - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
I'm wondering why the 3300X wasn't in the DigiCortex benchmark? This $120 dollar 4c/8t banger lays waste to the selected lineup. Or is it too much of a foreshadowing of how Zen 3 may perform? I guess benchmarks can sometimes be like a box of chocolates.ozzuneoj86 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Just a request, but can you guys consider renaming the "IGP" quality level something different? The site has been doing it for a while and it kind of seems like they may not even know why at this point. Just change it to "Lowest" or something. Listing "IGP" as a test, when running a 2080 Ti on a CPU that doesn't have integrated graphics is extremely confusing to readers, to say the least.Also, I know the main reason for not changing testing methods is so that comparisons can be done (and charts can be made) without having to test all of the other hardware configs, but I have one small request for the next suite of tests (I'm sure they'll be revised soon). I'd request that testing levels for CPU benchmarks should be:
Low Settings at 720P
Max Settings at 1080P
Max Settings at 1440P
Max Settings at 4K
(Maybe a High Settings at 1080P thrown in for games where the CPU load is greatly affected by graphics settings)
Drop 8K testing unless we're dealing with flagship GPU releases. It just seems like 8K has very little bearing on what people are realistically going to need to know. A benchmark that shows a range from 6fps for the slowest to 9fps for the fastest is completely pointless, especially for CPU testing. In the future, replacing that with a more common or more requested resolution would surely be more useful to your readers.
Often times the visual settings in games do have a significant impact on CPU load, so tying the graphical settings to the resolution for each benchmark really muddies the waters. Why not just assume worst case scenario performance (max settings) for each resolution and go from there? Obviously anti-aliasing would need to be selected based on the game and resolution, with the focus being on higher frame rates (maybe no or low AA) for faster paced games and higher fidelity for slower paced games.
Just my 2 cents. I greatly appreciate the work you guys do and it's nice to see a tech site that is still doing written reviews rather than forcing people to spend half an hour watching a video. Yeah, I'm old school.
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link
Agreed 99% with this (especially that last part, all hial the written review) - but I'd personally say it makes more sense for the CPU reviews to be limited to 720p Low, 1080P High and 1440P Max.My theory behind that:
720p Low gives you that entirely academic CPU-limited comparison that some people still seem to love. I don't get it, but w/e.
1080p High is the kind of setting people with high-refresh-rate monitors are likely to run - having things look good, but not burning frames for near-invisible changes. CPU limiting is likely to be in play at higher frame rates. We can see whether a given CPU will get you all the way to your refresh-rate limit..
1440p Max *should* take you to GPU-limited territory. Any setting above this ought to be equally limited, so that should cover you for everything, and if a given CPU and/or game doesn't behave that way then it's a point of interest.
dickeywang - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
With more and more cores being added to the CPU, it would've been nice to see some benchmarks under Linux.MDD1963 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Darn near a full 2% gain in FPS in some games! Quite ...uhhh..... impressive! :/MDD1963 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Doing these CPU gaming comparisons at 720P is just as silly as when HardOCP used to include 640x480 CPU scaling...; 1080P is low enough, go medium details if needed.Spunjji - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link
Personally agreed here. It just gives more fodder to the "15% advantage in gaming" trolls.croc - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
It would be 'nice' if the author could use results from the exact same stack of chips for each test. If the same results cannot be obtained from the same stack, then whittle the stack down to those chips for which the full set of tests can be obtained. I could understand the lack of results on newly added tests...For a peer review exercise it would be imperative, and here at Anandtech I am sure that there are many peers....
69369369 - Thursday, May 21, 2020 - link
Overheating and very high power bills happens with Intel.Atom2 - Thursday, May 21, 2020 - link
Dear Ian, You must be the only person on the planet that goes to such lengths not to use AVX, that you even compare Intel's AVX512 instructions to a GPU based OpenCL, just to have a reason not to use it. Consequently you only have AMD win the synthetic benchmarks, but all real world math is held by Intel. Additionally, all those synthetics, which are "not" compiled with Intel C++. Forget it... GCC is only used by Universities. The level of bias towards AMD is becoming surreal.