Intel SkullTrail Preview – Dual Core 2 Extreme QX9775 Processors

POV-Ray Real-Time Raytracing

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, and we were more than happy to include the data in our testing.

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 the cores in even our eight core test system as seen above.

Results: The pair of Intel QX9775 processors does roughly ten frames per second better than the QX9770 and twelve frames better than the Intel QX6850 in real-time raytracing! The first time we ran this benchmark Intel was getting just 5 FPS on the Core 2 Duo E6300, so it’s amazing to see how far Intel has come in the past two years on this benchmark. As Intel nears 30FPS it means that real-time raytracing is closer to taking off!