3D Media Creation
This is not something I do personally, but I know a lot of people are into 3D rendering at home. To test 3D rendering performance, we make use of Maxon’s CineBench program.
Based on Maxon’s animation software, Cinema 4D, CineBench is a good real-world benchmark that makes comparing systems easier for those of us who aren’t really familiar with creating 3D art. Cinema 4D was used to make such movies as Spiderman and Star Wars. Good enough for me!
We have also added 3ds Max, which is probably the most popular rendering software around. Finally, to round things out, we have POV-Ray, a totally free ray tracing tool. POV-Ray has a built-in benchmark which measures in pixels processed per second.
CineBench
CineBench shows us the same staggering we have been seeing all along.
3ds Max
Once again, the Core i7 shows an immediate performance increase over Penryn in a 3D rendering program. Hyperthreading is really showing its worth here.
POV-Ray 3.7.beta.28
For some reason, our POV-Ray benchmarking had issues. We first tested with Beta 29, and Core i7 results were lower than Penryn. Knowing what the expected performance should be, I moved down to Beta 28, and the results are shown here. This is still not what they should be though; Intel says the Core i7 965 should be scoring in the 4300 range, and all our other rendering results are directly in line with theirs. This is a beta though, so odd results can be expected sometimes.
Math
Yeah I know, we already looked at the ‘pure math’ results on the first page of this review. But sometimes math calculation in itself works in practical PC usage. Back in the day, the most popular program for overclockers to show off their e-peen was SuperPi. Unfortunately though, that program is not multi-threaded. So to take its place, we have wPrime. wPrime actually has absolutely nothing to do with prime numbers – what it does is calculate the square root of really large numbers (upwards of 32 billion at this point). Total calculation time is given in seconds. If more than one core is detected, the test is split into several threads.
Well if e-peen wagging is your thing, you will want to upgrade to Core i7, and make sure Hyper-Threading is enabled!
WinRar
We like to include an archiving benchmark, since after all, who doesn’t use archives on their machine? WinRar features an integrated benchmark utility, but note that the results themselves are not real-world in that it measures decompression/compression throughput directly. Other factors will make differences between systems less pronounced, but this does a good job of singling out CPU performance.
Hyper-Threading once again allows the i7 to pull way ahead of anything else.
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