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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DillholeMcRib - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link
Some of you peeps seem really, REALLY bored. Do you make all these comments while at work?Retycint - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
This is a niche CPU for an extremely niche market. That is all. Nobody (except people in that tiny niche) is looking to buy this CPU.AshlayW - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Sure it is, so go and buy an i3-9350K for (probably) 1% the price, and have the same single-threaded performance. If you want 14-cores, you're likely going to be doing multi-threaded work, you get my drift?This product has a small niche where you work on both types, and somehow need the 5-10% more ST perf the 9990XE has, over, say the 3950X which will boost to 4.7 on a single core at vastly (and this is a huuuge under-statement) lower power draw and price.
Proponents of Intel claim that Single-threaded speed is so important (because, hey, that 5% is all they have these days) but don't seem to understand that Zen2 has absolutely fantastic single-threaded performance. Within 10% of Intel's best, thanks to slightly higher IPC, and the clock speeds on 1T boost get up there in the high 4 GHz area, too.
vanilla_gorilla - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
>(because, hey, that 5% is all they have these days)And it's 5% on single threaded tasks that are instantaneous on our desktop PC. I don't have any desire to have 5% more performance there. What I want is the +30-50% performance on multithreaded tasks that have real, wall clock times that can be improved, which is what Ryzen delivers. Who cares if an Intel CPU has 5% better javascript when everything I do in my web browser is instantaneous? So instead of 15ms its 13ms? Ok? What blows my mind is when my kernel compiles or video encoding times are shaved off by MINUTES.
Retycint - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
I love how people are turning this into Intel vs AMD, even when this is an extremely niche CPU for an extremely niche market.>Who cares if an Intel CPU has 5% better JavaScript?
Well apparently people who buy these care. You are irrelevant to the discussion because you were never part of the target market for this anyway
HollyDOL - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
In scenarios where 'winner takes it all' those 5% are more than enough. Previously I worked on algorithmic trading and there it would be worth every cent.ET - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
> Against AMD counterparts, that 5.0 GHz frequency carves through anything like butter.From the benchmarks, it lost to the 12 cores 3900X on more than one occasion. While it's true that for specific workloads the 9990XE would be much better, on average it seems to definitely not be worth the price. Also, comparisons to Zen 2 EPYC CPUs (or Threadrippers, which will soon be released) would be much more apt.
chris.london - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
I was thinking the same. Even if I don’t take the power draw into account I am not impressed at all. And at 600W I would expect this to destroy the 3900X, so these results are actually quite embarrassing for Intel. I personally would rather wait for a 16 core Zen 3 AND pay for it than have this one for free.Retycint - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Well I'll gladly take this one for free... Infinite perf-to-price ratio (x performance over $0 price)GreenReaper - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
You may however have to factor in a new motherboard, and new cooling as well.