Benchmark Results: Adobe CS 6
The threaded filters in our Photoshop workload take full advantage of the Xeon E5-2687W’s eight cores, allowing it to wrap up this benchmark in half the time as Intel’s Core i5-3570K. Intel’s new Core i7-3970X lags behind by 10 seconds, outperforming the Core i7-3960X by a scant one second.
Our second Photoshop test exploits the software’s OpenCL support, tapping our system’s GeForce GTX 680 to help accelerate the benchmark.
CPU performance is still a vital component, though, and we see similar scaling as some of our other well-threaded metrics. The Xeon places first, followed by the Core i7-3970X, -3960X, and -3930K. A number of Intel’s quad-core and AMD’s quad-module processors fill in the rest of the chart.
The same story applies to Premiere Pro, which favors the eight-core Xeon, but also runs very fast on the six-core LGA 2011-based chips. Although they’re great for the price, Intel’s Ivy Bridge- and AMD’s Vishera-based processors are more mainstream; they cannot keep up.
We’ve seen After Effects respond favorably to memory subsystem improvements, but it tends to scale less aggressively based on processor performance. A mere four seconds separate the first six finishers in our benchmark. There are only eight seconds between the octet of Intel products we’re testing.