Benchmark Design

In order to answer the question of which CPU is best for gaming and work, we cannot rely on synthetic benchmarks. Instead, we need to get a good variety of real-world tests that can be interpreted and applied to other tasks. We also chose not to explore the overclocking potential of these setups because we wanted to show the minimum expected performance when buying these systems.

For my gaming benchmarks, I was planning on going head to head against systems of FiringSquad past, but in the process of running my gaming benchmarks, NVIDIA released 52.16 WHQL drivers and ATI released Catalyst 3.8, invalidating my comparison. In the interest of time, I will leave the 3D benchmark articles to Brandon and Chris, since they'll be able to provide the most meaningful results for you. For our CPU tests, we're focusing on real-world benchmarks for the digital photographer (single and dual CPU) and one scientific computing comparison.

If you look at the future of high-performance desktops, you'll likely find yourself looking at digital photography. This is a point where improvements in speed are noticeable. Digital photographers can take hundreds to thousands of pictures a day, but they aren't taking JPEGs. Instead they're capturing RAW images which contain all of the data they get back from the the shoot. They'll develop the images for JPEG for proofing, etc. This is done so that if the color balance is off or if the exposure is slightly off, it is possible to go back to the RAW "negative" and re-develop the image.

With regular workloads in 500-1500 images, even small differences in performance can make a big difference in the long run. These numbers are not unrealistic -- I'm not a professional photographer, but I took 980 images this year at San Francisco Fleet Week (a public air show in the San Francisco Bay) images with my digital SLR - I'm glad there is no marginal cost with digital pictures.

I need it now!

Unlike rendering animations where you can let it sit and one animation is a month-long project, photographers will need the end results right away so they can proof it, edit the images, and sell the images. They may be starting a new shoot the next day. Second, when it comes to 3D content creation, most of it is user-limited during the day (the CPU is idle when the artist is thinking about what he wants to draw). In the evening it's an overnight render of animation, which essentially means that if the render starts at the end of the workday, it just needs to be ready before the beginning of the workday the following day - it doesn't matter if it finishes at midnight or 15 minutes before the workday starts.

With increasing megapixel counts, cheaper flash cards, and more and more consumer-level cameras support the RAW file format, for real-world non-gaming CPU tests for the desktop we cannot imagine a better set of applications to test.