Other Benchmarks
Most of the other benchmarks in our current CPU suite turn back similar scores, regardless of whether they were run last year or today. While the apps on the preceding pages are updated to the latest versions to exploit OpenCL and multi-core optimizations, we also ran the other tests as well in the interest of completeness. We updated all of those apps with the latest available versions, since we'll be migrating to a new benchmarking suite anyway.
It comes as no surprise that most apps perform similarly in 2012 as they did in 2012. There are some exceptions, though. 3ds Max, for example, runs slightly faster on AMD's A8-3870 after a more mature driver. Meanwhile, we updated 7-Zip from version 9.22 to 9.28 without seeing a difference. HandBrake 0.95 was upgraded to version 0.98 for this review, and it does in fact deliver a marginal boost on both test systems.
Be careful with Photoshop. If you want to save money by purchasing the older CS 5.1 version, think again! The latest build delivers better performance before even taking OpenCL into consideration. Our older benchmark script, which uses a handful of threaded filters, gets a nice speed-up.
Rarlab, the developers of WinRAR, must have also realized the importance of optimizing for threading. The latest version, 4.2, reduces the processing time by 50% in the case of the AMD system and roughly 35% on the Intel machine, which only has two processing cores.
