Content and news by Rob Williams

At CES a couple of weeks ago, NVIDIA unveiled some forthcoming 360Hz G-SYNC monitors, allowing press who visited its suite at the Wynn to go hands-on with them. Before the event, I felt like the difference between 240Hz and 360Hz would be hard to spot, but fortunately for me, NVIDIA had a…..

We recently explored GPU performance in RealityCapture and KeyShot, two applications that share the trait of requiring NVIDIA GPUs to run. With more results in-hand, we’re now going to explore performance from five other renderers that also require NVIDIA: Arnold, Redshift, Octane, V-Ray, and Adobe Dimension.

Last spring, we wrote about OTOY’s plans for reintroducing native hardware support in OctaneRender for macOS, something that implies support for AMD’s Radeon discrete GPUs, Intel’s integrated GPUs, as well as Apple’s Metal API. Currently, Octane users on Mac need to be glued to an older version of the operating system to retain the CUDA support that’s critical…..

Luxion’s KeyShot 9 brings a lot of good stuff to the table, but of most interest to us is the introduction of not just GPU rendering, but also GPU accelerated denoising. In this article, we’re going to be taking a look at performance from both CPU and GPU rendering, and also talk about some quirks that you may encounter when shifting from CPU to GPU.

Turning a series of photographs into 3D models is a compute intensive process, one that can make good use of CPUs and GPUs alike. Capturing Reality’s RealityCapture becomes our second photogrammetry benchmark, and we’re introducing it with a dedicated look at graphics card performance.

It’s an age-old question: is Linux better than Windows, or vice-versa? It’s of course a loaded question, but we can easily take a look at specific angles, such as performance. In this quick match-up, we’re seeing how both OSes fare in a couple of rendering tests involving Blender and Chaos Group’s V-Ray.

After many years of fan anticipation, Autodesk has today released a brand-new Arnold Renderer that takes its GPU component out of beta. While Arnold 6 is introducing many other features, Arnold GPU coming out of beta denotes one important thing: that Autodesk is confident that the GPU renderer is effectively 1:1 with…..

We’ve already put AMD’s newest Ryzen Threadripper chips through our Linux test gauntlet, so it’s now time to shift our focus back to Windows, where we have an even more daunting number of tests to cover. It won’t take long to notice a trend: AMD’s 24-core 3960X and 32-core 3970X are ridiculously fast processors.

NVIDIA’s SUPER series of GeForce cards has reached a total of five, thanks to the recent introduction of two GTX variants. We’re taking a look at the 1660 SUPER here, with a focus on 1080p for the bulk of our testing, and up to 4K for high-FPS esports titles. Let’s see how the extra memory bandwidth is put to use!

The day many have been waiting for has arrived: AMD and Intel have officially launched their respective next-gen enthusiast processors. In this article, we’re going to follow-up on our 3950X Linux article from last week to introduce both Intel’s Core i9-10980XE and AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X into the test results.

We’ve reached the third generation of eighteen core desktop processors from Intel, with the launch of the new Core X-series, and its flagship Core i9-10980XE. Even with a bump to the max Turbo clock, and an increase of officially supported memory speed and total density, the most notable thing about Intel’s latest flagship is actually something else: its sub-$1,000 price tag.

Following-up on our previous quick look at AMD’s sixteen-core Ryzen 9 3950X processor, and having (mostly) finished catching up on benchmarking, we now have a much fuller look at overall performance from AMD’s newest wonder chip on-hand. Join us as we explore all of what this chip is made of across many rendering, encoding, and gaming workloads.

It’s hard to believe that after the super-long wait for Blender 2.80 to arrive, that version has become old hat, as 2.81 has just been released. As usual, we’ll work to integrate 2.81 into our suite as quickly as possible, so we can see how performance scales between versions. On the topic…..

AMD has augmented its Radeon Navi lineup with its first workstation card: the Radeon Pro W5700. This 8GB card shares traits with the RX 5700, but with optimizations in place, it can sometimes exceed expectations. We’re pitting AMD’s latest against NVIDIA’s Quadro RTX 4000, and a handful of others.

Since AMD launched its Navi architecture in July, we’ve seen the release of the gaming-focused Radeon RX 5700, RX 5700 XT, and RX 5500, which was announced just a few weeks ago. Now, Navi has hit the workstation, with the first product coming to us in the form of the Radeon Pro…..

With so many CPUs hitting the market this month, it was time to both retest our collection of chips and update our tests. In this article, we’re going to be covering a bunch of workloads in Linux, ranging from compiling to rendering, compute to encryption. AMD’s new 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X joins ten other processors, so let’s see how it stacks up.

We’re a little late on our full-blown look at AMD’s new sixteen core Ryzen 9 3950X, thanks in part to a recent suite overhaul that’s proving to take quite a while to run on each chip. We’re going to kick our coverage off with a quicker look at both rendering and encoding performance, so far comparing it to the 3700X, 3900X, 2950X, and also Intel’s Core i9-9900K and 9900KS.

For some, flying is an absolute joy. You get to chill on a bus 30,000+ in the air while reflecting on a book, work, or whatever happens to be outside the window. For others, flying can feel more like an ordeal, where the thought of being stuck on a plane for six…..

For about as long as video game emulation has existed, there have been fan hacks. Some of these hacks might be as simple as translating one language to another, while others could be more advanced, adjusting game rules and behavior. Then there are hacks that are more like entirely new games, such…..

With competition in the CPU market proving to be fiercer than ever, Intel has decided to haul out some big guns. “Big guns” in this case refers to eight cores running at 5GHz a piece. This comes to us in the form of the Core i9-9900KS, and you can join us as we pit it against the rest of our collection in creator and gaming workloads.