Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5

Autodesk’s 3ds Max is without question an industry standard when it comes to 3D modeling and animation, with DreamWorks, BioWare and Blizzard Entertainment being a few of its notable users. It’s a multi-threaded application that’s designed to be right at home on multi-core and multi-processor workstations or render farms, so it easily tasks even the biggest system we can currently throw at it.

For our test, we use a project found on the samples DVD that comes included with 3ds Max. It features a bathroom scene with numerous objects and makes heavy use of ray-tracing. We render this scene at 1080p, to mimic a render that one might do for a 3D movie.

Adobe Lightroom 3.0

Photo manipulation benchmarks are more relevant than ever, given the proliferation of high-end digital photography hardware. For this benchmark, we test the system’s handling of RAW photo data using Adobe Lightroom, an excellent RAW photo editor and organizer that’s easy to use and looks fantastic.

For our testing, we take 100 RAW files (in Nikon’s .NEF file format) which have a 10-megapixel resolution, and export them as JPEG files in 1000×669 resolution, similar to most of the photos we use here on the website. We also apply a light sharpening effect for glossy paper. Such a result could also be easily distributed online or saved as a low-resolution backup. This test involves not only scaling of the image itself, but encoding in a different image format. The test is timed indirectly using a stopwatch, and times are accurate to within +/- 0.25 seconds.

So far, both boards are neck-in-neck, again flip-flopping a bit. The largest gain was seen with our Lightroom test, with the 890FXA-UD5 clearing its run close to 4 seconds faster than the 790FXT.