Performance Part II; Real World -
LightWave 3D 9.6 x64 -
Our first real world test is LightWave 3D. This is an industry standard 3D Animation and rendering software from Newtek. Our rendering tests with LightWave 9.6 have changed. I have always been a fan of the Classic Camera and the multi-pass PLD anti-aliasing that it offered. However, what I did not know was that this type of camera model was only capable of about 75-80% CPU utilization. This makes it very inefficient (as I am sure you guessed) so we made the shift to the newer perspective camera and are using its much better (100% CPU utilization) threaded engine as well as a newer and more efficient form of anti-aliasing. Along with this new camera model we get ray tracing and some other nice features. We have also leapt from the 1080p resolutions we used before and are now setup with a 35mm 4k resolution of 4096 x 3072; this should give the CPU a nice workout. To show off the vast difference in performance between the two we ran both and show you the render times here. This also shows what you can do when your application is truly written for a multi-threaded CPU.

Under the demands of LightWave 3D 9.6 we see the improved caching and instructions coming into play in a real world situation. The Core i7 3770K is actually faster than the 12 thread Core i7 980X! This is pretty impressive when you think about it. The 980X has four more threads to work with and more available memory bandwidth. The 3770K still runs quite a bit behind the quad channel supporting Core i7 3960X.
Project Estimates -

CyberLink Media Espresso 6.5 -
After having various issues with AutoGK and Intel CPUs with more than four cores we have changed our Media Encoding test to use Media Espresso from CyberLink. Although this new utility does not have the same ability to transfer directly from DVD it is still a good test to transfer different media types into a usable format for your iPad, iPod, or other media player. Our test involves using multiple (Six) 20 minute media files and transcoding them for an iPad. This gives us a very good indication of how well a motherboard can handle this type of work load.

Cyberlink Media Espresso is a recent addition to our testing suite. This we decided to use this as a replacement for AutoGK when we found that one of the components of AutoGK would not support more than 8 threads properly. This prevented us from using it to test on the many CPUs. Still we have found that the best workloads are still converting from a DVD format into something that is supported in HD. In this regard Ivy Bridge is doing an outstanding job in maintaining its lead on Sandy Bridge our transcoding times are more than 60 seconds faster than the best time we have for our Core i7 2600K.

This is a prime example of the combination of the AVX instructions and using the GMA4000 for hardware acceleration. The Core i7 3770K simply walks away with the crown for video transcoding. This is a great thing for the consumer and even the prosumer market as transcoding video from standard formats to something usable on a portable device like an iPad or the Asus Transformer is becoming more and more common.

After Effects CS5 -
Adobe’s After Effects CS5 is an application that can be used to add animation, text and other enhancements to your video productions. This powerful application is built to work with the available memory and can easily saturate even the largest of systems. Because of its multi-threaded design and the fact that it can break out existing system memory into per-thread (or per core) allocations it makes it a great test of a CPU especially one with a built in memory controller. Our test package was put together by Peter Kapas from Bjorn3d specifically to test multi-core/thread systems. The results are the time it takes the system to render the “Mountain Dew” test file.

Ok talk about impressive, the AVX instruction in the 3770K actually help it to outperform the Core i7 3960X! We were very surprised to see this happen. It does go to show that raw power does not always win out over efficiency and finesse.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 -
Premiere Pro CS 5 from Adobe is a non-linear video editing and rendering application. It has components that allow you take your raw footage and turn it into a full blown video production complete with professional style transitions, audio and video effects and more. You can use Premiere Pro to combine or overlay multiple video and audio streams in the same user interface. Our testing here is with two AVHDC streams that were shot using our Canon Vixia MF40. The original resolution is full 1080p and we render it as shown below. To add some additional work to the normal load we added in five transitions (fold-up, push, slide, cube spin, fade to white) along with an audio exponential fade at the beginning and end. We also added in an extra layer that was reduced in size to fit in a picture-in-picture format (in the upper left hand corner.

The times here show that while there is still a lot to pick up from the AVX extensions there are still going to be applications that will want (and use) as many threads as possible for execution Premiere Pro CS5 is one of those types of applications. Granted the Core i7 3770K does an amazing job compared to the 2600K and even against the 3960X, but it just does not have the same potential as the Core i7 3960X.

Adobe Light room 2.7 x64 -
Lightroom is a photo post-production software and while it cannot replace Photoshop in terms of editing or creating images, it has many features that are excellent in their own right. One of the ones that we find the more interesting (and beneficial to us) is the use of batch exporting for RAW camera files. This one feature can make it much easier to transfer the RAW images we shoot on our Canon Digital Rebel T1i all using the same settings (color profile, black level etc). For our testing we take 100 RAW files (around 1.7GB) and convert them to 75% quality JPEGs at 1536x1024 resolution (72 dpi). We add some meta data to identify the images and export them to a sub folder in the same original folder. We time this to see how well the CPU performs its duty. The results are shown below.
As you can see the new Corew i7 3770K does a very good jobh at converrting your pictures using the export utility.