Intel Core i9-9900K CPU Review: 8-Core 9th Gen Coffee Lake Benchmarks

Intel Core i9-9900K: Cinebench, POV-Ray, And Fluid Dynamics

Cinebench R15 is a combination CPU and OpenGL 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 can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graphs below.

Cinebench
3D Rendering Benchmark

cinebench

The Core i9-9900K offered the best single-threaded score of the bunch in Cinebench and dropped in just behind the Core i9-7900X, but well ahead of the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X.
POV-Ray Performance
Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. 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.

pov 

Performance in POV-Ray essentially mirrored Cinebench. The Core i9-9900K once again outpaced the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, but couldn't catch the Core i9-7900X.

STARS Euler3d
Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, and cache and memory latency, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache sizes and memory bandwidth affect the score as well...

euler
*AMD Threadripper 2990WX (b) Results = 16 Cores Enabled, With UMA Memory Configuration

Memory and cache bandwidth, latency, and CPU throughput all play a role in this benchmark. The Core i9-9900K clearly outpaces the Core i7-8700K and Ryzen 7 2700X. The Intel many-core processors lead the pack, though.

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