Microsoft Office

Microsoft's Office suite needs no introduction as it's probably the most widely used PC software on the planet, installed on every office computer no matter the industry. Our tests cover a wide range of editing and creation tasks in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Image Editing — Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop has become the industry standard for photo and image processing. We run the latest Photoshop CC through a battery of typical editing tasks, like image resize, various blurs, sharpening, color and light adjustments, and image export.

Video Editing — Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro CC is the workhorse of the video production industry to create high-quality content for film, TV, and the web. It can handle pretty much every recorded file format and supports workflows for editing Full HD, 4K, 8K, and virtual reality content. Unfortunately, most of Premiere Pro is single-threaded, and media encoding is highly GPU accelerated, so benchmarking "export" on the CPU makes little sense. For our testing, we're using the software's "object tracking" functionality, which automatically scans through a video to follow a specific person or object—this task does indeed use more than a core, but doesn't fully scale. A lot of memory is consumed and accessed in the process (over 10 GB for our test scene).

Create 3D Model From Photos

Creating 3D models is a tedious and complex task that takes time and requires experienced artists. It's thus the holy grail of 3D modeling to reconstruct a 3D model from just a series of photos. That's exactly what Photogrammetry does. This method is also used to reconstruct terrain geometry from photos taken by aerial drones.

Text Recognition OCR — Google Tesseract

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is the task of turning text in scanned images or photos into actual characters for archival, further processing, or editing. While most OCR software is single-threaded, Google's Tesseract engine can operate on multiple pages of a scanned document at once, spreading the load over several processor cores. The software, which is considered one of the most accurate open-source OCR packages available, automatically runs a spellcheck on the initial recognition results, which adds to the complexity of the workload.