Results: Adobe Creative Cloud And Compression Tools
We run two scripted Photoshop benchmarks: one that is threaded and fully taxes our CPUs, and another that leverages OpenCL acceleration to offload work to our graphics cards.
It's interesting to see the GeForce GTX 970 demonstrate similar performance as the GeForce GTX 770 in tests that exploit GPU-based compute. We're not sure what's slowing the newer board down, but we were hoping to see it exhibit a lead over Nvidia's previous-gen architecture.
CPU and memory performance are critical variables in the rest of these tests, which do not leverage the heterogeneous nature of OpenCL. The After Effects benchmark is single-threaded and, like iTunes and LAME, responds to clock rate and installed memory, so the results are practically identical. Similar to Photoshop, Premiere Pro is optimized for multi-core CPUs and benefits from Hyper-Threading.
Compression Tools
The chart below represents three separate benchmarks. WinZip's -EZ switch forces the app to use maximum compression. That's a processor-bound test, and its more taxing workload translates to longer completion times. The OpenCL-accelerated version leverages graphics resources to help compress files larger than 8MB.
Our OpenCL-enabled benchmark shows an impressive performance improvement thanks to the GeForce GTX 970, which makes the previous page's Photoshop result even more puzzling. Regardless, the Core i7-based system wipes the floor with the previous build's Core i5.
