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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Arc1t3ct - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
I'd like to see the cinebench score for this cpu. It's probably the single most important performance metric for Architects and engineers.ballsystemlord - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Spelling error:"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."
"while", not "whule":
"Blender can take advantage of more cores, and while the frequency of the 9990XE helps compared to the 7940X, it isn't enough to overtake 18-core hardware."
ballsystemlord - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
What's interesting about this processors benchmarks is that even at 5.0GHz AMD's Zen2 processors are still fairly close. -- Not that I'm trying to attract fanboys, it's just interesting to compare the IPC, memory latency, etc.TitovVN1974 - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
IMHO, Linpack (Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL) Benchmarks) with not-too-many cores gives good upper bound estimation of practically obtainable perfomance in engineering and science.ballsystemlord - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
But only for Intel processors...edwardhchan - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Caseking is selling them for 1799 Euro with stock promised from Nov. 12.... So I guess the demand is low?cschlise - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
As I look at this and the struggle to make predictable quantum computing hardware, I see us reaching an inflection point where "traditional" methods will have to adapt a hybrid quantum piece because the features will have shrunk to the point where quantum effects become the norm, vice the exception.cschlise - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
What all this testing is showing me is that I should buy a mainstream Ryzen 9 3900X for $530 at newegg right now.yetanotherhuman - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Wow. There are times when it doesn't even touch a 3900X. This is not a desirable product.Icehawk - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
So no latency testing of any kind... which is what this machine is about.