Benchmark Results: MatchMover 2011, Vue 8 PLE, And Euler3D

Per Wikipedia: “In cinematography, match moving is a visual-effects technique that allows the insertion of computer graphics into live-action footage with correct position, scale, orientation, and motion relative to the photographed objects in the shot. The term is used loosely to refer to several different ways of extracting motion information from a motion picture, particularly camera movement. Match moving is related to rotoscoping and photogrammetry. It is sometimes referred to as motion tracking.”

The first step in match moving is identifying and tracking features—and that’s what our MatchMover 2011 benchmark does, using custom footage taken by Jon Carroll on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

The threading here seems light, if existent at all. Naturally, the Xeon X5680s have a small clock rate advantage over the W5580s, but it’s a little more difficult to explain both dual-socket configurations’ lead on the Core i7-980X. At the very least, we can say it’s probably not worth upgrading to a dual-socket arrangement just for this app.

On the other hand, Vue does show a definite proclivity for more potent processors. For the unfamiliar, Vue is used to create, animate, and render 3D environments, so it’s not surprising that this professional app appears well-optimized for multi-core, multi-threaded workstations.

Our test scene finishes in less than 10 minutes using a pair of Xeon X5680s. The same task takes more than 18 minutes on a single Core i7-980X. The scaling here is superb.

Based on the STARS Euler3D computational fluid dynamics production code, Euler3D’s workload is described as follows: 

“The benchmark testcase is the AGARD 445.6 aeroelastic test wing. The wing uses a NACA 65A004 airfoil section and has a panel aspect ratio of 1.65, a taper ratio of 0.66, and a 45 degree quarter-chord sweep angle. This AGARD wing was tested at the NASA Langley Research Center in the 16-foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel and is a standard aeroelastic test case used for validation of unsteady, compressible CFD codes…The benchmark CFD grid contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances the Mach 0.50 AGARD flow solution. Our benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.”

This one is deliberately optimized for threading (another version of the test is available to test in a single-threaded environment). Naturally, then, the dual-socket Xeon X5680 platform scores a first-place win. The Xeon W5580 takes second, though it’s held back somewhat by its slower clock rate.