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Our benchmarks continue to be 100 percent synthetic-free tests. If a machine gets faster scores in our benchmarks, it’s because it’s faster, not because of an esoteric driver hack.
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| We use the same HDV content we previously used, but now we’re outputting it to a Blu-ray-friendly MPEG-2 format instead of WMV. |
We decided to reuse much of our project from the previous Premiere Pro 2.0 benchmark suite, but we’ve upgraded to Premiere Pro CS3. Additionally, we’ve tweaked our output options. Instead of outputting the file to WMV9, we take our HDV-res video and spit it out to a 1080i Blu-ray-compatible file in MPEG-2 format. The project continues to use multiple effects, both CPU and GPU, and multiple video overlays. The benchmark really highlights the improved multithreading support in CS3. The test favors fast CPUs and scales well with clock speeds, but not as much when you move beyond four cores.
The only major change to our Photoshop test is the jump from CS2 to CS3. For this benchmark, we take a RAW file (shot with a 12MP Canon EOS 5D) and apply a ton of filters to it with multiple reverts along the way. Our Photoshop script tends to be CPU intensive, but disk I/O and the amount of system RAM also influence the result. Multicore support in Photoshop is better than in previous versions, but for the most part, this benchmark prefers clock speed over the number of cores.
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| ProShow is one of the top choices for professionals who want to make video slideshows from their still images. |
New to our benchmark retinue is Photodex’s popular ProShow Producer application. The application is a popular slideshow program among professionals and advanced amateurs. We like it because it not only represents real-world workloads but is also extremely multithreaded and will even load up a dual quad-core machine. In our benchmark, we build a slideshow using 130 12MP images shot with an EOS 5D at 3200 ISO. We apply a random selection of transitions and effects to the images and two MP3 files are used for background music. The entire show is then rendered as a 1080p MPEG-2 file. The benchmark likes clock speed and gets a good bump from quad-core CPUs, but our tests show that Intel’s eight-way Xeon platform doesn’t scale as well as we’d expect.
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| MainConcept is a popular multithreaded codec maker that’s embedded in many consumer and commercial applications. |
Also new to our benchmark suite is MainConcept’s Reference. You might not be familiar with the MainConcept name, but you probably use one of its products. Corel, Adobe, and AverMedia all use MainConcept’s codecs. We use MainConcept’s freely available Reference demo to transcode the 1080p MPEG-2 file created in our ProShow Producer benchmark to the AVC/H.264 codec at 1920x1080 resolution. The Reference demo uses the same codec as the fully licensed version but includes a watermark in a corner. The benchmark gets a healthy bump from quad cores and scales well with clock speed. Interestingly, this is one of the few benchmarks that run significantly faster under Windows Vista than XP.
FEAR: First Encounter Assault Recon was a punishing game and benchmark when it shipped two years ago, but it’s no match for today’s hardware. It is still very much a GPU benchmark at higher resolutions, but at 1600x1200, a combination of GPU and CPU influence the score. As a compromise, we run FEAR’s demo with soft shadows enabled and 16x anisotropic filtering. Hardware audio support, if available, is enabled for the benchmark runs as well. We’ll be replacing FEAR with a more current game within the next three issues.
This venerable Doom 3–engine game is OpenGL-based and generally exposes poor OpenGL drivers. We run our custom timedemo at 1600x1200 with 4x AA and 4x anisotropic filtering. The game is one of the first to support dual cores and it scales well with CPU support. We’ll also be replacing this benchmark within the next three issues.
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