Maximum PC Benchmarks Explained

Posted 02/08/2013 at 3:40pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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Meet the New Benchmarks

We chose our tests with an eye toward real-world workloads

ADOBE PREMIERE PRO CS6

We’ve been envious of the Mercury Playback engine since Adobe introduced it in Premiere Pro CS5. In Premiere Pro CS6, Adobe has tucked in even more enhancements to make it probably one of the fastest, if not the fastest, nonlinear editor on the planet. That presented a few problems for us, though: Do we render using the wickedly fast GPU or the CPU? Using the GPU could cut our times by several factors, but not all machines support the GPU encoding. In the end, our problem was solved for us, as the GTX 690 is not currently supported by the Mercury Playback engine, so it’s CPU all the way. That doesn’t mean the benchmark is a wimp. We find the multithreading in CS6 to be impressive. All 12 threads on our Core i7-3930K are hammered during the export. For the workload, we take 1080p video previously shot on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, add transitions and moving picture-in-picture frames with additional 1080p footage, and export it to H.264 formatted for Blu-ray. The six cores in our 3930K pay dividends, as our render took about 33 minutes. A stock Ivy Bridge setup took about 53 minutes.

GIGAPAN STITCH.EFX 2.0

The GigaPan Epic Pro uses a motor to pan your DSLR to create gigapixel images.

New to our stable is Stitch.Efx 2.0. Let’s face it, applying a sepia filter and scratch effects can be done on a $50 smartphone. Since PCs are about going big, we went as big as we could get. We used a motorized GigaPan Epic Pro head, a Canon EOS 7D, and a 300mm lens with 1.4x teleconverter to shoot a panorama of 287 images totaling 1.63GB. Using Stitch.Efx we stitch the shots into a single continuous 1.1 gigapixel panorama. Yes, that’s 1.1 billion pixels, or 1,100 megapixels. (That might sound like a lot, but it’s nowhere near the current record of 272 gigapixels—also shot with an Epic Pro head and 7D.)

Stitch.Efx is one-third single-threaded and two-thirds multithreaded. We use it to stitch together 1.6GB of JPEGs into one single 1.1-billion-pixel image.

About the first third of the process, where the app aligns the images, is single-threaded and sensitive to clock and microarchitecture. Ivy Bridge cores give the Sandy Bridge cores a good run for the money in this section, but in the blend section it’s all about the cores and this is where we see SB’s greater number of cores pull ahead of the Ivy Bridge chip. As we stitched “only” 287 images together, it’s mostly a CPU test, but we can say the process created no fewer than 24,339 files during the stitch, so small-file read and write performance should matter. With its mix of single- and multithreaded performance, Stitch.Efx2.0 is a good representation of today’s software. 

TECHARP X264 HD 5.0

Since our Premiere Pro CS6 test actually features MainConcept’s popular encoding engine, we cast about for another publicly available encoding test and found one in the newly released x264 HD 5.0. Created by tech website TechARP.com, the test uses the x264 library to encode a 1080p video stream multiple times. The benchmark is multithreaded and loves cores. It performs two passes, with the second pass compressing the compressed material even further to save space. We run in 64-bit mode and report the average frame rate for the second pass. In our testing, the hexa-core Core i7 smashes the newer Core i7 Ivy Bridge in the nose by a significant margin. We’ve found that encoders can be sensitive to memory bandwidth, so we reconfigured our machine from quad-channel to dual-channel mode (using larger DIMMs so the total amount of RAM would remain the same) and found a negligible difference.

PROSHOW PRODUCER 5.0

Favored by professional photographers, ProShow Producer 5.0 is a popular slideshow creator that we’ve long used as a benchmark. For our new benchmarks, we update to the latest version of the app, which adds GPU acceleration, but only for video playback. When we started using ProShow Producer five years ago, it was one of the few apps that could push quad-core chips to their limit. Unfortunately, the app seems to top out with four cores, but that’s fine. We intentionally picked ProShow Producer 5.0 knowing full well that it doesn’t scale with cores. Like Stitch.Efx 2.0, we wanted something that’s closer to most apps in performance instead of simply scaling as you add more cores. Why pick something that won’t push an eight-core chip to its limits? The sad truth is that the vast majority of apps can’t exploit the threads.

BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY

Arkham City is based on a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 and adds the latest DX11 bells and whistles. We run the test at 2560x1600 with 8x AA, tessellation on High, and detail on Extreme. Why not use some of the more advanced AA settings available from Nvidia or AMD? Since this test will be used on systems, it can be difficult to compare a proprietary antialiasing technique from one vendor against another vendor that doesn’t support it. Even at 8x AA and everything cranked up, the GeForce GTX 690 makes mincemeat of the benchmark.

FUTUREMARK 3DMARK 11

Our last benchmark is Futuremark’s 3DMark 11. We normally eschew synthetic benchmarks in favor of real-world benchmarks, but we have relied on the various iterations of 3DMark over the years. We’re choosing it here because it scales well with multiple GPUs, and this version doesn’t seem to represent the typical game of political football between rival graphics companies that previous versions have. For our test, we run the default benchmark for the Extreme preset.