Intel Core i7-2600K and i5-2500K Processors Debut
Cinebench R11.5 and POV-Ray
Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 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 R11.5
3D Rendering
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.
The new Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K performed very well in the Cinebench R11.5 benchmark. Here, the Core i7-2600K was easily the fastest Intel quad-core processor and the Core i5-2500K finished well ahead of the Core i5-750. Keep in mind, the Core i5-2500K does not have HyperThreading, so it can processes four fewer threads than the Core i7 processors can. Once again, there was no appreciable difference in performance between the various motherboards we tested and whether or not the Core i5's integrated processor graphics were used in lieu of a discrete GPU.
POV-Ray Performance
Ray Tracing
The performance trend in the POV-Ray benchmark essentially mirrored those of Cinebench. The Core i7-2600K was clearly the fastest of Intel's quad-core processors, falling victim to only the 6-core Core i7-980X. The Core i5-2500K was again significantly faster than the Core i5 as well.
POV-Ray , or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines, and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.
