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Blender Tests
Blender is an open-source, free content creation suite of 3D modeling, rendering, and animation capabilities. Originally released in 2002, it’s available in versions for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and several Unix distributions. It supports rigid and soft-body objects and can handle the draping and animation of cloth, as well as the rendering and animation of smoke, water, and general particle handling.
Our Blender test renders multiple frames of an animation of a rotating chunk of ice, with translucency and reflections. Rendering of this model uses ray-tracing algorithms and the program reports the rendering time for each of the animation’s 25 frames. The results are a summation of the rendering times for all frames and the lower the score, the better. You have to be careful with Blender since it defaults to using only two CPU cores; you must specifically set it to use all the cores your processor has.
Extra cores help here, although not as much as you’d think…it’s not until we get into the overclocked scores that real progress is evident. This is probably due to clock speed deficit on the part of the 5960X.
POV-Ray
The Persistence of Vision ray tracer is a free, open source 3D modeling program that uses ray-tracing algorithms to generate realistic three dimensional images. Ray tracing is very computationally intensive, and the POV-Ray program has a handy built-in benchmark to let you check the performance of your system.
Cores make more of a difference here, with the 6- and 8-core CPUs turning in much better scores than the 4770K
Let’s look at the memory bandwidth our DDR4-2166 system can give us next…
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