Application Benchmarks

Individual Application Scores

Super Pi

SuperPi is one of the most popular benchmarks with overclockers and tweakers. It has been used in world-record competitions since forever. It is a purely single-threaded CPU test that calculates Pi to a large number of digits—32 million for our testing. Released in 1995, it only supports x86 floating point instructions and thus makes for a good test for single-threaded legacy application performance.

wPrime

While SuperPi focuses on calculating Pi, wPrime tackles another mathematical problem: finding prime numbers. It uses Newton's Method for that. One of the design goals for wPrime was to engineer it so that it can make the best use of all cores and threads available on a processor.

Rendering — Cinebench

Cinebench is one of the most popular modern CPU benchmarks because it is built around the renderer of Maxon's Cinema 4D software. Both AMD and Intel have been showing this performance test at various public events, making it almost an industry standard. Using Cinebench R20, we test both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance.

Rendering — Blender

Blender is one of the few professional-grade rendering programs out there that's both free and open source. That fact alone helped build a strong community around the software, making it a highly popular benchmark program as well due to its ease of use. For our testing, we we're using the Blender "BMW 27" benchmark scene.

Rendering — Corona

Corona Renderer is a modern photorealistic renderer that's available for Autodesk 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. It delivers physically plausible and predictable output due to its realistic lighting algorithm, global illumination, and beautiful materials. Corona does not support GPU rendering, so CPU performance is very important for all its users.

Rendering — KeyShot

The standalone KeyShot rendering software features fast and efficient workflows that help you get high-quality realistic product shots in the shortest-possible time frame. Real-time raytracing, multi-core photon mapping, adaptive material sampling, and a dynamic lighting core provide high-quality images that update instantly even when interactively working on the scene. KeyShot is optimized for usage on CPUs only, which lets them use more complex algorithms than a GPU-based renderer. Unlike our other rendering tests, we record "frames per second" in KeyShot while rendering, so higher numbers are better.

Game Development — Unreal Engine 4

Unreal Engine 4 is one of the leading multi-platform game engines in the industry that's not only advanced, with lots of features, but also helps you get results quicker than competing products—time is money. Before a game is shipped, the lengthy process of "light baking" has to be executed. It takes all static geometry and fixed light sources in the scene and precalculates lightmap textures for them, which results in a tremendous speed boost in performance of the final game because these calculations no longer have to be performed in real-time on the user's system. For our benchmarks, we generate baked light maps for a relatively simple scene, which usually takes several hours.

Software Development — Visual Studio C++

Microsoft Visual C++ is probably the most popular programming language for creating professional Windows applications. It's part of Microsoft's Visual Studio development suite, which has a long history and is widely accepted as the "gold standard" when it comes to IDEs. Compiling software is a relatively lengthy process that turns program code into the final executable, and programmers hate waiting for it to complete. We run a medium-sized application through the C++ compiler and linker, and execute the resource compiler, too. The build is executed in "release" mode with all optimizations turned on and multi-processor compilation enabled.

Web Browsing — Google Octane

Google Octane tests web browser performance by running a suite of Javascript-based tests that represent typical use cases in today's dynamic, interactive web applications.

Web Browsing — Mozilla Kraken

Mozilla Kraken is similar to Octane in that it measures the execution time of Javascript, but it uses a different set of tests based on the SunSpider benchmark. Test cases include audio processing, search algorithms, image filtering, JSON parsing, and cryptography.

Web Browsing — WebXPRT

WebXPRT 3 is a browser benchmark that measures the performance of typical web applications, like photo enhancement, media management using AI, stock option pricing, encryption, OCR, charting, and productivity. This is in contrast to our other two browser benchmarks which focus more on microbenchmarks, testing specific algorithms.

Machine Learning — Tensorflow

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days. Machine learning based algorithms are taking the grunt work out of many manual tasks that could previously only be performed by humans. In order for Deep Learning AI to solve problems, it has to be trained first using a large set of training data that is evaluated repeatedly to generate a neural network that can later be put to work (also called inference). Google's Python-based Tensorflow is one of the most popular machine-learning software packages that supports both CPUs and GPUs. Setting up Tensorflow for the GPU is a bit complicated, so lots of algorithm development and training on small data sets still happens on the CPU. Training performance on the CPU can also beat the GPU when problem sizes exceed typical GPU memory capacities.

Physics Simulation

Engineering widely uses the finite element method (FEM), which is able to simulate the flow of liquid (CFD), heat transfer and structural stability, to verify whether a final product is able to meet design requirements. Solving such a problem breaks the system up into a large number of simple parts called finite elements that are all able to interact with each other. This is a highly complex mathematical task that requires a lot of processing power, which is very difficult to parallelize on GPUs. Our Euler3D benchmark test is fully parallellized to make the most of multiple CPU cores, but it also puts a lot of stress on the memory subsystem.

Brain Neuron Simulation

In order to better understand how brains work, biology and medical research uses software to simulate neurons and their interactions with each other. Scientists hope that this can ultimately lead to an understanding of how biological intelligence emerges. Just like our physics simulation test, this is a highly complex, memory intensive problem that is best solved on CPUs—GPUs aren't well suited to these algorithms.

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.

Virtualization — VMWare Workstation

A virtual machine is a simulated computer inside your computer that's completely independent of the host PC. This not only improves security, but also enables software written for different operating systems to execute on one physical machine. Virtualization is the foundation for "the cloud" and helps reduce hardware ownership cost by dynamically spreading out virtual machines over multiple computers to make best use of given hardware resources. We're testing VM performance using VMWare Workstation, with hardware virtualization support enabled for both Intel and AMD processors. Curiously, many AMD Ryzen motherboards ship with the "SVM" setting disabled by default, so we made absolutely certain we had enabled it.

Database — MySQL

More data is stored and processed today than ever before in human history. The backbone for this revolution are database systems that manage storage and retrieval throughout large data sets. Whenever you interact with a website or other digital service, it's almost guaranteed that at least one database is involved in returning the results you are looking for. We benchmark the most popular database system "MySQL" in the TPC-C test, which simulates a large number of warehouses and their constantly changing inventory. The number reported is "transactions per second", so higher is better.

Java

The Java programming language is designed to be platform independent, highly scalable and fault tolerant, which is why it's very popular for enterprise services that work with large amounts of data and many concurrent users. Our test suite consists of a large mix of individual Java benchmarks, some of them single-threaded, some that scale somewhat, and some that fully scale to as many cores as are available.

Compression — WinRAR

Data is compressed almost all the time when it moves over the wire to reduce download time and transfer sizes. WinRAR uses a more advanced compression algorithm than classic ZIP, which is why we chose it for this test. It's also able to scale across multiple processor cores.

Compression — 7-Zip

Another popular compression software is 7-Zip, which includes a benchmark that measures the integer instruction rate (MIPS) using the ZIP algorithm. It makes good use of multiple threads, when available.

Encryption — VeraCrypt

Encryption is the cornerstone for today's security on the Internet, ensuring not everybody can see your data as it travels through various routers on the way to its final destination. VeraCrypt, which is based on the disk-encryption software TrueCrypt, enables open-source encryption for your disk drives without any backdoors. The application comes with a multi-threaded performance test that measures the rate at which data can be encrypted. We are using the AES algorithm for our testing.

Media Encoding — H.265 / HEVC

Nowadays, all video that's consumed, whether on TV, physical media, or streamed over the Internet, is compressed using various codecs. Our first video-encoding test uses the fairly new H.265 codec, which is also known as HEVC. We compress a full HD video using the latest version of the X265 encoder, with 8-bit color depth, preset "slow", and a quality setting of crf 20.

Media Encoding — H.264 / AVC

H.264, also called AVC, is a slightly older compression format, though probably the most widely used compression format these days because it is well supported in even older hardware. We compress the same video as in the H.265 test using the X264 encoding software, with preset "slower" and crf 20.

Media Encoding — MP3

MP3 revolutionized the music industry like no other technology. Introduced in the 90s, it enabled massive reduction in audio-file sizes without noticeable impact on sound quality. This made music downloads, and ultimately streaming, a feasible method of content delivery over the Internet. For our benchmark, we convert a 2.5 hour-long 44.1 kHz Stereo recording to a variable-bitrate MP3 file. MP3 encoding is a single-threaded process.