The Intel Core i9-9990XE Review: All 14 Cores at 5.0 GHz
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 28, 2019 10:00 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.
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/
Blender can take advantage of more cores, and whule the frequency of the 9990XE helps compared to the 7940X, it isn't enough to overtake 18-core hardware.
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.
Taken from the Linux Version of LuxMark
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’.
We see a slight regression in performance here compared to the 7940X, which is interesting. I wonder if that 2.4 GHz fixed mesh is a limiting factor.
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/
145 Comments
View All Comments
kgardas - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Nice comparison, but why is ryzen 3xxx missing from your compilation test? Would be most interesting!Slash3 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
...it isn't?Slash3 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Nm, I see what you meant.Flunk - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Probably part of Intel's deal to loan them the chip.Retycint - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Intel wasn't the one who loaned them the chip. Nice try, thoughjabber - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Three or fours years ago this might have been exciting...EdgeOfDetroit - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
I love all the hate from AMD fanbois here who don't understand that for some things, single thread speed is king. And that apparently didn't read the article long enough to see the completely valid application for these yet felt justified in slamming Intel for selling it. Not surprisingly, those were the first comments, as they didn't have to read the article before commenting.ET - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
I love the Intel fanboys, who must post such a comment even before any AMD fan had said anything, just because they know that the value of money on that thing is atrocious and that it loses to a 12 core AMD consumer CPU is several tests.Retycint - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
I mean, nobody is buying Lamborghinis based on their cost-to-perf ratio....AMD is irrelevant in this scenario because it doesn't satisfy the same needs. Not every CPU had to be mass-market oriented
nandnandnand - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
There's nothing to hate. Intel Core i9-9990XE isn't a real product.