Rendering Benchmarks

We include Mental Ray and Shake as a point of reference, although both applications are strictly 32-bit at this time. Mental Ray is further hindered by the fact that the version we have is not SMP-aware.

Mental Ray 3.3.3

You may be interested to see how some single CPU setups perform on the same test render here. Once again, we are running the same Maya benchmark file found in our other reviews. While Solaris allows us to run some Linux binaries with emulation, we could not get the license servers to install correctly, which made this a Linux-only portion of the test. We ran Mental Ray via Maya using the command below:

# maya_render_with_mr -file Benchmark_Mental.mb

Since Mental Ray cannot utilize all eight physical cores, this benchmark doesn't do the V40z a lot of justice. Nevertheless, you can see how a single core from an Opteron 875 stacks up against a single Opteron 250 from the previous two benchmarks.

Shake 3.5c

Apple develops a great digital effects package called Shake. We took the opportunity to run a benchmark script by Lindsay Adams, which you can download here. The benchmark script renders 10 frames under various effects using one or multiple CPUs. We sum the render times and display them below. The times recorded are the averages of three runs.

The command run for this benchmark is:

# shake -exec hardware_test_v01.shk -vv

Even though Shake seems to support all the processor cores, there is a scaling issue. This is just one case in many where having lots of slower processors might not be as efficient as having fewer faster processors instead.

Apache Benchmarks Compiling
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  • nottlv - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link

    #46; the 8 way record claim was for a 64-bit JVM. The PowerPC result you reference was for a 32-bit JVM. specjbb stresses the memory architecture heavily (there's no I/O); the submitted result from IBM include a machine with 64GB of RAM, while the Sun Opteron box had 16GB, and they are running different JVM versions. If you look at the lower numbered runs you'll notice they're pretty close (the Opteron being slightly ahead), but that it hits it's wall much earlier due to significantly less RAM.
  • jjames5 - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link

    8 way jbb2000 world record - right!

    This result is a year old and still bests the sun with over 50%:

    http://www.spec.org/jbb2000/results/res2004q3/jbb2...
  • nserra - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link

    #34 That is plain stupid, it isnt from been taken out that it will protect him (if thats the true), or the microsoft guys cant read forums where the article have been already posted.

    Microsoft only have to look for who usually talk with anand.

  • Opteron - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link

    Forget my last comment...


    ps. i missed 4 way Xeon and Itanium systems :D
  • Opteron - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link

    There is miscalculations about percentages, those are calculated wrong.

    In http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/sun%20fire%20v4...

    comment is:
    " We see a 43% performance increase over the quad Opteron 250 V40z; certainly impressive but we would like to see more."

    But actually it's almost 64% since there is no point in comparing 5 threads vs 5 in a 8core system..
  • Googer - Friday, July 1, 2005 - link

    Where did the article go?
  • KristopherKubicki - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    Den: Very true but recall that our previous test was done on Opteron 850s instead of Opteron 852s. The 852 performs a bit better than th 850.

    opus13i: We have been stuckin MI redtape land for some time. It wouldn't make sense to change the benchmark at this point either because our previous tests used the 32-bit single core solution. Since they don't seem to have much desire to provide us with the correct license we will probably drop that benchmark in favor of something a little more versatile.

    Kristopher

    Kristopher
  • jkostans - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    I dont care who made the hardware, its a hell of a machine. I wish Intel had to rely on inovation and good products to survive like AMD does. Intel really doesn't have many products capable of out performing AMDs equivalent anymore.
  • opus13i - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link

    ugh.

    Did you even bother to check with mental images? With a simple phone call you could have had the proper licensing in place for 8 cores, as well as every possible variation of 64bit possible.

    "We include Mental Ray and Shake as a point of reference, although both applications are strictly 32-bit at this time. Mental Ray is further hindered by the fact that the version we have is not SMP-aware."

    way to go detective, i dont suppose you actually looked at teh specifications did you?

    http://www.mentalimages.com/2_1_2_configurations/i...

    no 64 bit indeed.



  • Xunilla - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link


    You folks are giving Sun a bit too much credit on the hardware portion of this review. In reality, the system OEM is a company called Newisys, a subsidiary of Sanmina-SCI.

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