3D modeling and rendering

Cinebench rendering
Graphics is a classic example of a computing problem that's easily parallelizable, so it's no surprise that we can exploit a multi-core processor with a 3D rendering app. Cinebench is the first of those we'll try, a benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D rendering engine. It's multithreaded and comes with a 64-bit executable. This test runs with just a single thread and then with as many threads as CPU cores are available.

Now here is a truly impressive performance from the Core i7. Even the Core i7-920 trounces the QX9770, thanks in part to Hyper-Threading. Let's look at a few more tests, and we'll discuss the results at the bottom of the page.

POV-Ray rendering
We're using the latest beta version of POV-Ray 3.7 that includes native multithreading and 64-bit support. Some of the beta 64-bit executables have been quite a bit slower than the 3.6 release, but this should give us a decent look at comparative performance, regardless.

3ds max modeling and rendering

Valve VRAD map compilation
This next test processes a map from Half-Life 2 using Valve's VRAD lighting tool. Valve uses VRAD to precompute lighting that goes into games like Half-Life 2.

In each of the three fully multithreaded rendering tests above—the POV-Ray chess scene, 3ds max rendering, and Valve VRAD—the Core i7 brings major performance gains over the Core 2. Even the Core i7-920 is consistently faster than the Core 2 Extreme QX9770.