PC Gamer Presents - PC Hardware Handbook - May 2018

Above:

SPECviewperf is a

harsh test of a

system’s CAD

capabilities

AMD BUILD

FEATURE

AMD vs. INTEL

CHOOSING

BENCHMARKS

FORGET YOUR

STANDARD TESTING

SUITE, IT’S TIME TO

GET SERIOUS

Assessing the performance of a workstation for

CAD applications isn’t easy, mainly because real

workloads vary so wildly. Even when handling

the same models and data, what you’re doing

can be just as important as what you’re working

with. While you may be CPU-bottlenecked on

some tasks, you can be held back by RAM, hard

drive, or graphics card in others. There’s a lot of

factors when it comes to CAD work, and that’s a

problem when you want to know how one

workstation compares to another.

There is a solution: industry stalwart

SPECviewperf. This pushes any would-be

workstation through a series of gruelling tests to

ascertain how they’ll perform in the real world of

3D CAD modeling. Because the tests used vary

in complexity and rendering techniques used,

there isn’t an overall score or index; instead, we

have results for different testing scenarios

(which, in fact, are made up of multiple test runs

themselves). You can download and run

SPECviewperf 12.1 for free on your own machine

to see how it compares: http://www.spec.org. Note

that it’s a chunky 4GB download, and not a fast

one either.

In theory, the big takeaway is that

professional graphics cards make a big

difference in CAD. This is muddied by the fact

that plenty of the tests benefit from the raw

grunt offered up by the GTX 1080 Ti, so it isn’t

the whitewash for the AMD Radeon Pro WX

7100 that you might expect. The GTX 1080 Ti

does incredibly well in the DirectX Maya

benchmark, while the WX 7100 is almost 10

times faster in the penultimate SNX test. If

you’re serious about CAD, then upgrading to a

Quadro P6000 might make sense, although you

need to be prepared to drop up to £5,200 on

such a card.

Note that these tests are largely processor-

agnostic, running on a single core, so the focus

is very much on the graphics card. Even so, as

with gaming scenarios, a faster core clock on

your CPU can make a difference here.

CAD PERFORMANCE