Blender

Blender is an open-source, free content creation suite of 3D modeling, rendering, and animation capabilities. Originally released in 2002, it's available in versions for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and several Unix distributions. It supports rigid and soft-body objects and can handle the draping and animation of cloth, as well as the rendering and animation of smoke, water, and general particle handling.

Our Blender test renders multiple frames of an animation of a rotating chunk of ice, with translucency and reflections. Rendering of this model uses ray-tracing algorithms and the program reports the rendering time for each of the animation's 25 frames. The results are a summation of the rendering times for all frames and the lower the score, the better.

Blender is limited to a maximum of 8 threads, so it's interesting to see that the Sandy Bridge Extreme CPU still performs better than the standard Sandy Bridge. Perhaps the extra cache helps.

POV-Ray

The Persistence of Vision ray tracer is a free, open source 3D modeling program that uses ray-tracing algorithms to generate realistic three dimensional images. Ray tracing is very computationally intensive, and the POV-Ray program has a handy built-in benchmark to let you check the performance of your system. AMD wins this round, posting stock-clocked results that are 26% better than Intel, although the FX-8150's lead narrows to a mere percentage point when both processors are overclocked.

Same story with this rendering benchmark, with the i7-3820 coming in just ahead of the i7-2600K.

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