Digital Storm's Enix Gaming System Reviewed
Cinebench R10 and R11.5
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Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput. Cinebench is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system could render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.
This is the last time we'll include Cinebench 10 results; the benchmark scales very poorly with additional cores as evidenced by the Enix and Maingear Shift's similarities. The Enix's single-core scores are extremely impressive.
Now let's check Maxon's latest Cinebench 11.5. One of the reasons Maxon released the update was to address a problem in R10's scaling. One of the challenges of parallel programming is that it takes a non-zero amount of time to spin off and retire additional threads. In Cinebench R10's case, this purportedly had a negative impact on the program's scaling in multicore configurations. Cinebench 11.5 fixes the problem.
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Cinebench 11.5 is the latest update to Maxon's 3D rendering benchmark suite and the third major iteration of the Cinebench series. As with R10, CB11.5 includes a single-threaded, multi-threaded, and OpenGL test. We've focused on the first two tests as part of ourprocessor comparison; the OpenGL test is a GPU-specific benchmark and is meant to represent professional graphics performance. Scores between the two benchmarks are notdirectly comparable, although it is possible to render R10's workload using 11.5, should you feel inclined.
Again, the Enix's single-core performance is quite impressive. Consider the fact that the Enix is only clocked 12 percent faster than the Shift, but is 30 percent faster in single-threaded rendering. The Shift still wins out overall, which is what we'd expect from a six-core processor against a quad-core. At the same time, the gap between the two processors is much smaller than might be expected.
The Shift has 50 percent more cores than the Enix, but is only 16 percent faster. The different scaling rates in R10 vs. CB11.5 is an excellent illustration of how difficult it is to take full advantage of theoretical performance boosts in the multi-core era. It wasn't until Maxon revised the benchmark that anyone released the previous version had left 1-1.5 cores worth of performance lying on the table. The fact that the previous version of the benchmark was fully multiprocessor-aware is that much more evidence of the complexity of the problem.
