Tom's Hardware Wants You: CPU Benchmarks 2011/12

StarCraft 2! I used to see it in some benchmarks, but it slowly got faded out. =[

Can you guys add more programs that benefit from hyper-threading? It will be easier to refer a CPU to new system builders if there's benchmarks in front of our face

Yep, this is a great test for single-core strength along with the original Crysis. (and Warhead??) AvP is a terrible CPU benchmark; on my X4 965 it locks all 4 cores at 40%, regardless of whether I'm running one or two GTX 460s. For more proof, let's look at what Tom's had to say :
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 859-5.html
In my opinion, BF:BC2 is the gold standard for CPU scaling at the moment, and will probably be supplanted by BF3.

+1 to SiSoftware Sandra 2011, this is the only synthetic I use, but it's awesome.

I've been using Tom's CPU charts since it came out to spec out not only desktops but also entry level servers built on enthusiast parts. Most of them run server software on Linux though so I'd like to cast a vote for the Phoronix test suite.

The cpu benchmark would be a joke without battlefield 3.
i dont know if this applies to the cpu benchmark suite itself, but i think it would be interesting to come up with an appropriate "background program suite" for the gaming benchmarks.
basically, there was a huge debate over whether the i3-2100 would outperform the phenom ii quads in a real-world environment because a real user runs a number of programs while gaming. id like to see this tested in some way. i think this will also be an interesting benchmark in the context of the upcoming bulldozer release, should that happen before the end of the world.

My only request would be to add in some sort of Maya rendering (software or mental ray) or simulation performance bench. I know you already include Cinebench and Blender, but performance and scaling can vary quite significantly between these programs. And amongst pro's and hobbyists alike, Maya is one of the most widely adopted 3D content creation programs out there. If you have a content creation section in your bench suite, Maya just seems like a must.

And I know you guys are probably already considering this, but adding BF3 (when it's released) to your gaming section would be great as well.

Matlab, taking advantage of multi-core processors and GPU processing

Agreed I'd love to see benchmarks for MATLAB, Solidworks or more CAD programs

I suggest to simulate real-life experience simulation rather than synthetic performance benchmark. So we should just use Apps and Games. Should also add video editing/converting tool (e.g. mov to rmvb ..etc). Games should use either BF3 or MW3. Others like Guild Wars 2, latest Need for Speed & NFL/NBA/FIFA series, follow by either Civ5/StarCraft2/Diablo3. Not sure if there's any capable benchmark for Flash/HTML5 games, but it will be good as well to check Civ World (Facebook) and others.

That's a good idea. All previous gaming articles on the subject show no difference, but Resident Evil 5, and Metro 2033 definitely showed improvement with and without on my system. Those can't be the only two.

Total War: Shogun 2 is a pretty serious test of horsepower especially if you use DX11. Starcraft 2 would also be nice. When Battlefield 3 comes out that's a definite must too. IntelBurnTest might be nice too- it rates your CPU on GFlops and it's free.

Civilization 5: How long does it take to get to the next turn, considering a large map, and maybe ith autosave on/off (if that even matters, i'm not sure).

Starcraft II (with medium details, but with high settings for the CPU, like physics); a replay is a good test because it can be repeated, altough it does not stress the CPu as much as a real match.

I'm not sure if you know the software, but Ansys is a great software to stress the CPU. It's a engeneering simulation software, look up some images on Google. It takes an awfull lot of time to simulate stuff on a somewhat complex model, specially with a fine mesh and simulating a lot of things (heat transfer, elastic/plastic deformations, and so on).
There are other similar softwares tho, I'm just familiar with this one.

I would like to see some bench tests for the lightmass rendering (psuedo ray tracing) used in Unreal.

im sugjesting running a standard hard drive system and a ssd bases system in comparrison through your normal bench tests .. plus what ever you come up with there it would be interesting to see how negitive of an impact runing say western digital black 64mb cache drives or velosa raptor drives vs ssd drives on the new processors when they are finnally released i bet it would help a lot of people make there choices

I'd like to see at least one game that involves lots of AI's running around. RTS or [MMO]RPG testing may be confounded by latency or other network issues, but hopefully something can be found in this category.

How about some antivirus software like norton or kaspersky. i.e. full system scan

how about multitasking benchmarks?

what if i want to use handbrake and surf the web. what if i want to......

GTA IV and Dirt 3 are great CPU benchmarks.

Why do you have Aliens vs Predator when in EVERY SINGLE benchmark ever made, this game shows that a CPU has absolutely no impact. Same thing for Metro 2033, to a lesser extent.

On the other hand, why don't you add GTA IV? I know it's poorly optimized and a little old now, but it's one of the few games that will actually provide a big performance boost when a new CPU is purcahsed or an old one overclocked, so I'd like to see it there.

RipBot

not to sound lame but please keep the Just Cause 2 benching.
I have grown a custom to it and use it frequently.
it can actually be a good comparison and judge of performance when paired with a matching gfx card.
thanks.

P.S.
hyper-threading and non hyper-threading would be a nice category, I agree..

Maybe Diablo 3 bench, sis sandra is good.

handbrake 2PASSES!!!

I would also like to see some MATLAB and/or Solidworks benchmarks.

Multi-tasking for sure. No specific programs really, but things like video encoding while watching 1080p videos/YouTube etc in the background. or Various games while playing video/YouTube on a second monitor. Even things like multi-boxing MMO's on multiple monitors.

Basically anything that is able to test which systems stay the most responsive/suffer the least performance hit when they are forced to divide their attention between multiple high demand programs at the same time.

I agree with bringing in some RTS games as well. Not necessarily SC2, but look to ones, even if they are a bit older, that can really hammer a CPU with complex AI's and thousands of units at the same time.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Obviously for now we have to stick to software that's available, but BF3 will absolutely be part of the graphics suite, at the very least, once it's available (just as BF2 was before it

Best,
Chris

Excel 2007 or 2010
multithread bech: main concep and 7zip. handbreak and antivirus. handbrea, antiviruz and minimun pfs game....
minimun fps on several games like crysis 2...

I'd like to see the floating-point and integer benchmarks here: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ or any of the benchmarks at spec. I would suggest any of the BOINC apps, too, but the ones that I run seem highly variable.

I also second the motion for SolidWorks.

Tom should test Facebook FLASH games like Frontierville wich are VERY CPU LIMITED because of FLASH, and are used by millons.
I know it may be hard to get FPS info on such games.
This can be hard also because these games are updated frequently. But you should find a way to make it happen.
As a matter of example I have an i5 2500k and Frontierville runs at probably 20-30 fps on a reasonably big farm. (level 60ish)
(I don't like facebook games, but my girlfriend does, as many others)
(Sorry for the bad English)

I recommend testing Adobe Acrobat X for conversion of picture to text (text recognition). Gives credit to a cpu for office productivity.

Even though Grand Theft Auto IV is old, CPU bottleneck was the dominant frame rate issue with the game.

So much so that Quad cores had a significant performance increase over what was considered adequate at the time(dual cores)