Intel’s Core i7-975 & 950: Preparing for Lynnfield

3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test

Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:

There's hardly any performance difference between the 975 and the 965 here, but given their price parity it makes sense for the 965 to go away. Nehalem's performance here is just astonishing.

Cinebench R10

Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.

In the single threaded results we already saw the benefits of Intel's Turbo Mode come to light. The higher end i7s are faster at single threaded tasks than even the fastest dual-core processors.

Execute eight threads in parallel and now the i7 has no equal. Even the slowest i7-920 is 22% faster than the Phenom II X4 955.

POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.

I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.

Blender 2.48a

Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.