X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Ian Pellant]

cbdllc,

Great - at last the sub 60 second "barrier" is broken.

The i7 3770 series processors are nominally 10% faster at most calculations and produce only about 60% of the thermal heat load of the previous i7 2600 series. Faster and cooler.

My components are on order - they have about 2000 miles of road transport to endure... the waiting game begins.

The i7 3770K has the top performance Intel integrated graphics. I found a web benchmark that indicated the integrated graphics could easily outperform many top end add-in gaming cards. Apparently it has blazing DirectX acceleration... but no indication of how it handles OpenGL (needed for Chief).

I have ordered the standard i7 3770 since I'm adding a video card and not relying on the Intel integrated graphics... so I won't be able to test how good the i7 3777K is at every day Chief Architect 2D and 3D camera viewing.... is it possible for you to try the integrated graphics and report back? (Use the perspective camera and then try a "final render" with shadows turned on - that should give a graphics processing time test as opposed to ray tracing.)

Cheers.

[cbdllc]

...is it possible for you to try the integrated graphics and report back? (Use the perspective camera and then try a "final render" with shadows turned on - that should give a graphics processing time test as opposed to ray tracing.)

Cheers.[/QUOTE]

I can do that as it still sitting on top of my desk and I have to open it up again to add another drive. I'll render your test plan with the 680 GTX remove it and time the on-chip GPU.

I purchased the "K" version to play around with overclocking. So far all I have done is turned on the XMP memory profile which reads the RAM and then resets memory timings and speed automatically (went from 1333 to 1867) and used Gigabyte's new 3D BIOS and moved the CPU clockspeed slider up to 4.0 GHz and rebooted. Internal temps only went up about 1 degree in normal use. Raytracing, using the stock Intel air cooler, jumps the temps from 43C to 75C.

Jeff

[Ian Pellant]

Hi cdllc,

I haven't gone looking for the thermal specs on i7-3 series yet. It took a while to find the old Prescott specs.... which indicated a thermal throttling temp of 75C... which may still be the design temp at which the new processors cut themselves back. So, you may have oc'ed to it's design limit. Be careful of any long ray tracing jobs at the top end if the air cooling is maxed out.

Intels hype for the generation 3 i7 with HD 4000 integrated graphics sounds impressive. Only note I could find about OpenGL is that it supports OpenGL 2.1. ATI FireGL cards are supporting OpenGL 3 and above... so I suspect that there are some apps that will be beyond the Intel integrated graphics engine.

The ATI Radeon card in my old experimental box cooked itself a few weeks ago so I had to fall back to a very old Radeon 9250. I then found that Chief X4 will not color texture render in perspective camera views. The old card can only manage OpenGL 1.4. And that's where OpenGL caps in my HP netbook. Neither of them will color render in Chief X4; there is no problem in Chief X2.

The issue here is if business (not home office) level computers hit the market with i7 HD 4000 graphics, whether they would be a good base for Chief without adding a separate graphics card. At present the "gaming" computers are becoming way over the top in bit blit graphics, sound and price to be a cost effective business choice for a production office running Chief. (We found a new ASUS Business line of computers using i7's that are a third the price of the gaming boxes sold in this little part of the world.)

The graphics card should not affect raytracing (I would have thought)... but Intel seem to have sneeked in a floating point accelerator between their CPU and GPU in the i7 Gen 3 that may have some benefit (I dunno)

Thanks to all that have overclocked a Gen 2 i7 to around 4 GHz and achieved sub 60 second ray tracings. It seems that the "magic" number is around 4GHz for the Intel i7's.

AMD seem to be a long way behind... which I must confess is a disappointment. In 2007 AMD Athlons trounced Intel... Intel has bounced back to the top. (this Quarter).

Cheers.