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/
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yannigr2 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
An over 300W chip that loses in so many cases from chips that cost under $500, with less than half power consumption. And Intel is $auctioning$ it. That isn't even funny. It's tragic.AshlayW - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
600W for performance that's not even going to be that much over a 3950X (if at all?) Intel is a laughing stock at this point. Can't wait to see the 9900KS, and have a good laugh at the last desperate, dying twitches of the Skylake architecture.29a - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
HFT should be illegal!MrSpadge - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Why? And on which basis would you forbid it? I think the better way to deal with this is to attach a tiny tax to each transaction. So if it's really worth it, they may do it. But the government gets its share and can redistribute to something more useful.RBFL - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
It has no useful purpose for society, the fact it is difficult to identify the people being harmed does not mean that harm is not taking place.I think making people have a 1 second relationship with a share is not unreasonable. Just because someone can do something doesn't mean we have to allow it. We have speed limits, laws against dishonesty and murder and we could just as easily have one against HFT.
The fact that exchanges sell expensive server space to these companies for lower pings, while purportedly being the arbiters of fair play and price transparency is, of course, another big issue.
rahvin - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
So anything you in your all knowing capacity deem as not useful for society at large it should be illegal? Doesn't that mean gaming should be illegal?I've yet to meet a single one of these people that complain about HFT that actually understand how the market works, how stock trading function and what HFT even is. Most of them simply heard some talking point they regurgitate without any understanding of how the stock market even works let alone how a stock transaction works or what HFT involves.
shadowx360 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
It's a mix of ignorance and jealousy, that they can't be the successful ones rolling in dough, and all investing is somehow evil and taking advantage of the common worker. There are some downsides to HFT, namely increased market volatility and cascading problems where a fall in prices can trigger millions of stop losses that compound the issue, but like you said, most have zero clue.RBFL - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
And that statement is based on?I am not jealous of an industry that has basically bought its way to success through lobbying and every time it explodes it expects the rest of us to reboot it, while mysteriously keeping the proceeds prior to the crash. An industry that gives away billions of our dollars of our money to avoid their own prosecution. Where almost no-one goes to jail after egregious lies, fraud, money laundering,....
All investing is not evil, however many of the practices of the industry are. Lobbying against fiduciary duty for the small investor, for example. If you actually look at the share classes available you will undoubtedly see some that no-one who understood what they were being sold would ever buy. Telling people 'they are responsible for their future' while not cleaning up the industry is like throwing sheep to wolves. And no, it is not everyone's responsibility to know every evil practice in every area of life in which they are forced to deal. It is unrealistic for the well educated, let alone the average citizen. It is why we have laws, which are generally reactive rather than proactive and thus mainly address known abuses rather prospective ones.
Alistair - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Nice article, except the final page. Why mention "highest ST for HEDT" and "carves through AMD like butter" etc., then you don't even make mention of any MT performance in summary. You could have said, in MT scenarios, it performs about the same as any Intel 18 or AMD 24 core server CPU or some such.Alistair - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
my meaning is the summary shouldn't just be for what is awesome, but should also summarize all the results... no mention of multi threading performance on the final page at all, because it isn't special?