Intel 1333FSB Processors Arrive – QX6850 and E6750

POV-Ray Real-Time Raytracing

The morning the Intel QX6700 article was to be posted Legit Reviews was e-mailed by one of the developers over at POV-Ray to see if LR could include real-time raytracing in our performance analysis of Kentsfield. After spending a bit of time to get the beta software to work correctly LR has some of the only real-time raytracing numbers available for Conroe and Kentsfield.

E-Mail From POV-Ray — I thought I might ping you about an experimental feature we’ve added to the POV-Ray SMP beta: real-time raytracing. It’s mostly useful to folks who have multi-core systems and in fact is something that I’ve wanted to do for years but the hardware just wasn’t there (at least not in the consumer price range). It works best on a kentsfield or later, but a core 2 duo should be sufficient if you don’t mind sub-10fps frame rates.

If you want to try it out it please feel free to grab it from: http://www.povray.org/beta/rtr/

This experimental software by POV-Ray was a welcomed addition to our testing and was able to spread the work load across all eight cores on our V8 test system as seen above. The number that is used to gauge performance is shown in the status bar at the bottom of the main window as seen in the above image of with Intel V8 test system with two Xeon X5365 processors taking care of the rendering.

The Intel QX6850 showed off nice numbers in POV-Ray raytracing and it’s amazing to see how fast these processors have gotten. The first processor I used on this benchmark was the Intel E6300 and at just 4.80 FPS it seemed like a hopeless benchmark. Now we are seeing frame rates in the teens and above, which is amazing! None of the desktop procesors come close to the pair of quad-core Xeon X5365 processors, but 14.28 FPS is very fast. The Intel E6750 comes in at half the FPS, but this is expected as it has half the number of cores and has a lower clock frequency.