SPEC’s Latest SPECapc Benchmark Supports Autodesk’s 3ds Max 2015

SPEC’s benchmarks have long been a stature in our performance reviews, with the SPECapc series in particular being a favorite due to their ease-of-use. The organization’s latest benchmark, SPECapc 3ds Max 2015, couldn’t have landed at a better time: We recently upgraded to the latest 3ds Max version ourselves, and Intel’s Haswell-E is just around the corner and would make for a great platform for a benchmark like this.

Much has changed since the last SPECapc 3ds Max release, 2011, so this one reflects everything that’s changed since then, even taking into account the changes to the program’s viewport. DirectX 11 shaders and vector maps support is also introduced, along with new visual effects.

SPEC’s baseline test machine is a Dell Precision 690 that includes a dual-core Intel Xeon 5130 (circa 2006), 16GB of ECC RAM, and an NVIDIA Quadro Q600 graphics card. For our testing, we’ll likely kick-off our benchmarking with both the X79 and X99 platform (4960X and 5960X), and compare the differences with and without an NVIDIA Quadro graphics card.

SPECapc 3ds Max 2015 supports 4K resolutions, which is quite appropriate given that’s going to become a far more popular resolution in the workstation space as time goes on. The latest version of Microsoft’s beloved OS isn’t officially supported, though, so for an ideal benchmarking experience, you’ll want to stick to the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

As with some of SPEC’s other benchmarks, SPECapc 3ds Max 2015 is completely free to the end-user, with commercial entities required to pay $2,500 for a license that would allow them to market their results or design their products around them.

Big congrats to SPEC on the release of this benchmark; I look forward to putting in some good testing time over the next couple of weeks.