Professional Graphics Benchmarks

SPEC viewperf 11 and Cinebench R11.5

SPECviewperf is a sampling of professional 3D Modelling and engineering software, which typically are validated for workstations using high end CPU and Professional editions gaming GPU

The most well-known of these applications are CATIA, Lightwave, Maya and SolidWorks.

CATIA and MAYA dos not run away on the Intel system yet SolidWorks does showing it can take more advantage of the I7’s better processing capacity and 12 threads.

Note that the AMD A6 has a higher score, although within margin of error the A6’s CPU is based on the Phenom II architecture, which has a higher IPC than the newer Bulldozer architecture, which depends on a higher clock speed to allow its architecture to deliver performance gains.

As we mentioned prior, the low base clock of 3.3GHz is the FX-6100’s main problem.

Cinebench contains two modes, a multi-threaded CPU benchmark which scales linearly with the addition of CPU cores as well as an OpenGL graphics test of a fixed scene.

The first score is our multi-core scores with the second the single core score.  A multiplier represents the performance scaling a particular CPU’s multithreading setup achieves.

The Quad core AMD A6 delivers almost a 4X speedup in multi core mode, almost 100% efficient.

The Three module, six core AMD FX-6100 delivers 4.23, which depending on how you consider the CPU architecture.  From a broad view, this is a disappointing score.  Additionally the benchmark is not fully optimised for this CPU.

The six core, twelve thread Intel i7-3960x delivers a 6.76x speedup over a single core, like the AMD A6 a near 100% efficient score.  Hyper threading on Intel CPUs uses the existing CPU pipelines in a two-stage manner to process additional threads, on particular CPUs the Hyper threading feature delivers a free speedup but this is software dependant.

Photoshop CS5

Photoshop CS5 is GPU accelerated for texture manipulation and rendering however, the image filters themselves are still CPU bound.  The quicker the test finishes the better.

In the heavily multithreaded and optimised Adobe Creative Suite things look much better for the AMD FX-6100 and all three CPUs exhibit a linear performance delta between them.