The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10600K CPU Review: Skylake We Go Again
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 20, 2020 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Skylake
- 14nm
- Z490
- 10th Gen Core
- Comet Lake
CPU Performance: Rendering Tests
Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Crysis CPU Render
One of the most oft used memes in computer gaming is ‘Can It Run Crysis?’. The original 2007 game, built in the Crytek engine by Crytek, was heralded as a computationally complex title for the hardware at the time and several years after, suggesting that a user needed graphics hardware from the future in order to run it. Fast forward over a decade, and the game runs fairly easily on modern GPUs, but we can also apply the same concept to pure CPU rendering – can the CPU render Crysis? Since 64 core processors entered the market, one can dream. We built a benchmark to see whether the hardware can.
For this test, we’re running Crysis’ own GPU benchmark, but in CPU render mode. This is a 2000 frame test, which we run over a series of resolutions from 800x600 up to 1920x1080. For simplicity, we provide the 1080p test here.
This is one of our new benchmarks, so we are slowly building up the database as we start regression testing older processors.
The Core i9-10900K scores 15 FPS at 800x600, which is just about playable.
Corona 1.3: Performance Render
An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.
We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.
The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark
Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/
V-Ray
We have a couple of renderers and ray tracers in our suite already, however V-Ray’s benchmark came through for a requested benchmark enough for us to roll it into our suite. We run the standard standalone benchmark application, but in an automated fashion to pull out the result in the form of kilosamples/second. We run the test six times and take an average of the valid results.
This is another one of our recently added tests.
POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing
The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/
Interestingly the Core i9 with only 10C outperforms the 12C Ryzen 9 3900X here, likely due to the higher sustained frequency of the Intel chip. We clocked 220W on our Intel chip for this test however, well beyond the 120W of the AMD processor.
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catavalon21 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
The ability to edit (or ^Z) would be most welcome, trust me.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Isn't that Skylake running a bit dry by now? But, seriously, Intel really risks losing a lot of market share in future years by selling these "classics" at high prices, and that is if one can get one in the first place.Curious: how many commercial customers buy Intel desktops just because they have iGPUs, but want more CPU oomph than the 3200G has? Is that why Intel still dominates the OEM desktop market?
AnarchoPrimitiv - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Intel dominates the OEM market through intimidation and threats of retribution... They were literally convicted of bribing OEMs to NOT use AMD CPUs all throughout the 2000s in several courts around the world. The trials uncovered emails between Intel executives that stated, and I quote, "Dell is the best friend money can buy".... The proof is in the fact that currently, the Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs are the best mobile chips offered right now, but Dell only puts them in the low end laptops. Why? Because Intel is probably giving huge financial incentives to bar AMD from premium designs to perpetuate the myth that AMD isn't a premium brandRetycint - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Do keep in mind that these are baseless speculations, based on something that happened 2 decades ago. Both Intel and AMD have changed since then (new engineering team, new management etc) and there has been no evidence of Intel providing incentives to cripple AMD systems. Go take your conspiracy elsewhere.And before you inevitably accuse me of being an Intel shill, this isn't about Intel or AMD, it's about facts to support your claim, of which there have been none
Irata - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Baseless speculation? Financial horsepower, MDF and meet the comp funds are current and no secret.Why do you think there are no Ryzen 4000 laptops with GPU above a 2060?
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link
Not entirely baseless, as they made two distinct claims. I've been a party to how Intel's "Marketing Development Funds" work - and work it does, at all levels from OEM to reseller to retailer. These days they don't explicitly punish anyone for not buying AMD - they simply tie rebates that will improve the profit margins on a product to specific quantities of those products being sold. It's "nobody's fault" if those quantities happen to make the sale of an AMD product by a given retailer or reseller distinctly unlikely.As for incentivizing bad *builds* of AMD systems, though, I'm not so sure. Intel clearly do a lot of work building reference platforms, and the economics of doing integration testing for a new vendor is not trivial. Honestly though, it's hard to tell how we *would* know if this were going on, because it would absolutely be made to look innocent - just like last time.
brantron - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
"literally convicted of bribing"1) No. That's not what "literally" means.
2) No. No one was even *charged* with a crime, much less convicted.
3) No. It wasn't about bribery.
The reason Athlon 64s weren't ubiquitous way back when is the same reason the 4000 APUs aren't today - there aren't enough to go around.
If your post were to be rephrased without hyperbole, baseless accusations, and whataboutism unrelated to the topic of this article, it would read something like this:
"6 months after AMD's announcement of Renoir, the number of 4000 APUs sold for desktops is literally zero (see how that works?) because TSMC is still slammed."
WaWaThreeFIVbroS - Thursday, May 21, 2020 - link
Your ignorance is amusingIt is technically a bribery
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel...
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link
First 3 points: accurate, if not entirely on-topic. Nobody was charged with a crime, but Intel sure were fined a lot for collusion.Which gets to the 4th point: again, accurate, but not entirely relevant. AMD were definitely not able to match Intel for manufacturing, which is why they couldn't have beaten Intel out of the market entirely, but that was barely related to why they weren't getting into Dell systems. See the aforementioned proven-and-fined-for collusion.
drothgery - Friday, May 22, 2020 - link
Or because premium designs take longer when the new chip isn't just another respin of the same thing, and AMD hadn't produced a viable high-end notebook chip in well over a decade so it made sense to wait and see if Ryzen 4000 was any good rather than designing in advance?