Rendering and Encoding Benchmarks
Corona comes as a standalone benchmark. It renders a fixed scene six times and we measure the time it takes to complete the task. This application loves threads so the more the merrier. As you can see, the Core i9-7900X took just 97 seconds which is less than half the time it takes the Core i7-7700K, it's also a 34% improvement over the 1800X. The 7820X was roughly on par with the 6950X while the 7800X was slower than the 6900K but did out-edge the Ryzen 5 1600X.
Blender is a popular application and is often used for benchmarking CPU performance by both AMD and Intel. The open source software is free to download and I used version 2.78 along with AMD's Ryzen render file for the workload, so yeah these new Intel CPUs are rendering Ryzen CPUs, hmm... Anyway, the Core i9-7900X didn't seem to waste anytime pondering the implications, completing the job in a blistering 18 seconds. The Core i7-7820X took 21.5 seconds and the 7800X was done in 26 seconds – rather strong performance from the new Intel CPUs.
For our HandBrake test we take a 4K high quality video file and convert it from H.264 down to 1080p using HEVC, also known as H.265. The numbers you are seeing in this graph show how many frames per second each CPU was able to transcode the video at. The Core i9-7900X is a beast, with its 30.7fps being 31% faster than the 6950X and 51% faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X. The higher clock speed of the 7900X really helps here though the added memory bandwidth is equally important.
Even the 7820X is able to pull ahead of the 6950X, beating it by a 9% margin, remember this is an Intel 8-core part versus their previous generation 10-core part, so mighty impressive stuff. Intel's the 6-core 7800X was about equal to the 6950X.
Right, so this is the test I care most about as I spend quite a bit of time each day rendering videos, to the CPU that can save me the most time here is generally the one I use. For example, the PC used to render this video packs a Core i7-6950X and I had planned to probably replace it with ThreadRipper.
That said, the current version of Premiere Pro CC isn't that good at taking advantage of high core count CPUs and as a result the 7900X is just 4% faster than the 6950X, so a bit of a disappointing result here. This benchmark is CUDA accelerated by a GTX 1080 Ti so keep that in mind, though there aren't a huge amount of effects in my videos for the GPU to accelerate.