System Builder Marathon Q4 2014: Mainstream Enthusiast PC

Results: Adobe Creative Cloud

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 achieve the exact same performance as the GeForce GTX 770 here. We're not sure where the bottleneck lies, or if it's simply a coincidence, but we'd expect the GeForce GTX 970 to have faster computational prowess.

CPU and memory performance are critical variables in the rest of these tests, which do not leverage the heterogeneous nature of OpenCL. The Acrobat benchmark is single-threaded and, like iTunes and LAME, is affected primarily by clock rate. After Effects CC is as well. Similar to Photoshop, Premiere Pro is optimized for multi-core CPUs and benefits from Hyper-Threading.