Intel Core i7-3820 3.6GHz Processor Review

POV-Ray 3.7 RC3

Processor Performance on Pov-Ray 3.7 RC3:

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer was developed from DKBTrace 2.12
(written by David K. Buck and Aaron A. Collins) by a bunch of people
(called the POV-Team) in their spare time. It is a high-quality, totally
free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is
available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86
Linux. The POV-Ray package includes detailed instructions on using the
ray-tracer and creating scenes. Many stunning scenes are included with
POV-Ray so you can start creating images immediately when you get the
package. These scenes can be modified so you do not have to start from
scratch. In addition to the pre-defined scenes, a large library of
pre-defined shapes and materials is provided. You can include these
shapes and materials in your own scenes by just including the library
file name at the top of your scene file and by using the shape or
material name in your scene. Since this is free software feel free to download this version and try it out on your own.

The most significant change from the end-user point of view between
versions 3.6 and 3.7 is the addition of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing)
support, which, in a nutshell, allows the renderer to run on as many
CPU’s as you have installed on your computer. This will be particularly
useful for those users who intend on purchasing a dual-core CPU or who
already have a two (or more) processor machine. On a two-CPU system the
rendering speed in some scenes almost doubles. For our benchmarking we
used version 3.7 RC3, which is the most recent version
available. The benchmark used all available cores to their fullest extent to complete the
render.

Once rendering on the object we selected was completed, we took the elapsed time from the dialog box, which indicates the exact time it took for the benchmark to finish the benchmark. A lower time indicates faster system performance. This benchmark used all 12 threaded and loaded each one up at 100% load!

Benchmark Results: The Intel Core i7-3820 finished the POV-Ray benchmark in 205.77 seconds and while it beat the Core i7-2700K, it was only 4.67 faster. The Core i7-3820 was 76.29 seconds slower than the Core i7-3960K Extreme Edition processor, so the flagship processor is the clear winner when it comes to threaded applications that can use them all.