CPU Benchmarks circa 1997

About 10 years ago we were curious to see how our SGI’s stacked up against other processors in terms of rendering power. We chose a “highly complicated” scene to render with PovRay since it was available for many systems and collected the results.

We just recently re-ran the benchmark on a modern computer and you’ll notice the update at the top of the table.

ProcessorMhzOperating SysTimePixels Per SecPov VersionDate Tested
1 Intel(R) Xeon(TM)3400Ubuntu Linux w/Wine44s79713.12/08
DEC AlphaServer 4100 5/600600UNIX X4.0D-112m 43s21513.022/98
Intel Pentium II Xeon400WindowsNT43m 34s16383.110/98
Intel Pentium II MMX(SCSI)350Win954m 21s13853.1a11/98
Intergraph TDZ2000 Pentium II300WindowsNT5m 1s1164
Indigo2 R10000195IRIX6.25m 27s1070
Intel Pentium II233Win956m 25s9113.025/98
PowerPC G3266MacOS 87m 23s792
Pentium Pro200WinNT 4.0SP37m 57s733
AMD-K6 PR2-200200Win959m 54s590
O2 R5000180IRIX6.311m 37s503
SunUltraSparc 1150?12m 52s454
Indigo2 R4400250IRIX13m 35s430
Intel Pentium150Win9515m 18s381
Inigo2 R4400200IRIX16m 36s351
DEC Sable190Ultrix18m 15s319
Cyrix 6×86-p166+133Win9519m 59s292
Cyrix 6×86-p150120Win9522m 00s266
SGI R4400150IRIX23m 36s247
DEC Alpha150?Ultrix24m 56s233
Intel Pentium75Win9525m 40s227
Intel Pentium75MS-DOS26m 36s219
PowerMac604/150150Mac 7.533m 29s174
SGI R4000100?IRIX35m 10s166
SGI Indy R4600133IRIX 6.242m 7s138
SGI PI 4D/3536IRIX55m 12s106
Indigo R300033?IRIX1h 10m 33s82
Mac PowPC710066MacOS 7.5.11h 37m 3s60
Intel 486DX266MS-DOS2h 58m 20s32
Amiga 400025AmigaOS4h 37m 22s20
Cyrix 486DX40Win955h 4m 57s19
Cyrix 486DX40MS-DOS6h ?m ?s16
Intel 386DX33MS-DOS11h 27m 53s8
Amiga 10007.14Amiga19Days0.08

Conclusions

The results aren’t perfect since the version of PovRay we used was simply the latest version we could get at the time. Our first test was probably about 13 years ago. Yes, the Amiga 1000 really did take 19 days to render the fish.

Credit to Daniel Kramer who collected the original tests on his geocities page which is (remarkably) still preserved online if you’d like to visit.

Render Options

We used fish13.pov as our test scene to render on all the systems. Here are the command line arguments that we used for every test:

+A +W720 +H486 +Ifish13.pov +O(image).tga +L(libpath)

Every time we got a new system we try and run this test on it. If your interested in testing out your processor please let me know. You should include the results with all the approprate info to fill in the table below.

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