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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AshlayW - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Agreed. This product is a pathetic attempt to push their slight advantage in single-core, and justify the obscene pricing too. It's disgusting, really, tech press seem to lap up these things without understanding that this product is, well, pointless.Intel made like 5 of them. So, AMD could bin a 3950X so damn effectively, you can have 4.7 on all 16-cores, because trust me with that level of binning; it's possible. But they won't, because they actually have people buying thier silicon for datacentres.
Anyway, the ST performance isn't even that much higher. Nothing worth the obscene price. I'll wait for the 3950X, and hope AT will sing its praises as it will likely demolish Intel's entire HEDT at a lower price and half the power use - it's only fair.
xrror - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Guys, seriously...I'm an AMD person myself, but give Intel some credit - I doubt (sadly) that AMD could even release a Ryzen 5Ghz base clock part right now. Granted they might be able to bin out a 4.7 one but....
2nd, everyone going on and on about how expensive the 9990XE. Like it's under $3000? That's stupid cheap! Historically these HPC chips are like 1 or 2 cores enabled out of 12 and you pay over 5 or 10grand for them. Look up the old socket 1366 HPC chips like Xeon X5698 some time!
http://www.cpushack.com/2018/07/03/cpu-of-the-day-...
Korguz - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
" Like it's under $3000? That's stupid cheap! " maybe in your world.. but for the rest of us, that is stupid expensive.xrror - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
It is stupid cheap for a halo professional performance part from Intel. But even a cheap HPC - $3000 proc - it is more money than I could ever justify personally spending for what would essentially be a glorified gaming rig.Which means, we're not the target market. Even in your world.
Retycint - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
The whole point of this chip is that it throws price-to-perf out of the window for highest possible ST perf sustainable on all-cores. You know, like what the article describes?But sure, AMD has better value or something, so everyone that buys Intel is stupid, despite the fact that different people have different usage scenarios and, gasp, Intel performs better under certain cases
FreckledTrout - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
This was fun to read even if it is akin to describing what a brown unicron looks like.airdrifting - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Everytime there is a worthless product from Intel or Apple you always see fan boys and smart ass trying to defend it.Single threaded 9900K >=
Multi threaded 2990WX, maybe even 3950X >
1_rick - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
If you click the link to Case King, they've cut the price to 1799EUR/1996USD (at today's rates).29a - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Please get rid of the 3DPM and FCAT benchmarks, the article even admits they are both poorly written.MrSpadge - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Ian, what happened to your appetite for chips? Are you ill or is this toasty piece of egineering not tempting enough?