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 included benchmarking model on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. We shoudl also note that we used the latest 64-bit beta build of the program. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput.
POV-Ray was a dead heat, with only 12 points separating the highest and lowest scores. Technically, the X38 came out on top, followed by the nForce 680i SLI, and finally the 780i SLI, but the delta is so small this one is definitely a tie.
For this next batch of tests, we ran Kribibench v1.1, a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the folks at Adept Development. Kribibench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported.
We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "Ultra" model that is comprised of over 16 billion polys.
Kribibench clearly had issues running on the nForce chipsets. Both the nForce 780i SLI and 680i SLI put up framerates significantly lower than the X38. We suspect there was some sort of incompatibility between this application and NVIDIA's nForce drivers that caused the discrepancy.
