Until now, 3DMark has been the benchmark software for measuring the performance of PC graphics cards; However, they have now added this new benchmark called CPU Profile which is used for the first time to measure CPU performance in the same application, although we have to keep in mind that, as with the benchmark results for GPUs, the results which we are going to obtain, they will give us a subjective and arbitrary score, that is to say that no quantity will be measured but a score will be attributed according to the performance.
How to install the CPU profile in 3DMark
3DMark has a free version and several paid versions with different benchmarks available in one and the other, and is available both through Steam and independently. The CPU profile is available in versions Advanced Yes Professional, and therefore it is not included in the benchmark pack of its free version, so if you want to be able to use it you will have to buy the application (which is usually on sale for 3 or 4 dollars frequently).
That said, to access the installation of this benchmark, simply go to the Benchmarks section at the top right, where we can access this test and if we have not installed it, we will be offered to just do it at the push of a button. The test takes up only 21MB and takes only a few seconds to install, although this obviously depends on the speed of your internet connection.
How does this benchmark work for the CPU?
3DMark’s CPU Profile benchmark introduces a new approach to CPU benchmarking. Instead of producing a single number, this benchmark shows us how CPU performance changes as the number of cores and threads used changes. CPU Profile has six tests in total, each using a different number of threads; the benchmark starts using the maximum number of threads available on your CPU, then repeats using 16, 8, 4, 2 and ends with a single-thread test.
These six tests are run one after the other (although as you can see in the screenshot above, we can disable the ones we want if we select the “Custom run” tab) and the results can be compared with other results of the same processor model that you have. . So this is a great way to check if your CPU is delivering the performance it should, and for overclockers it also shows the CPU’s overclocking potential and a way to measure performance gains in OC.
In addition, a monitoring graph is displayed at the end in which you can see how the processor operating frequency and temperature have changed during successive tests.
As we said, the score obtained is totally arbitrary but it is still used to compare your result with that of other CPUs of the same model. For example, in our test with a Core i7-8700K the green bar shows the performance obtained, while the vertical black line in the horizontal bar shows the median of the results of the same CPU, showing that we are below (the benchmark is in below). we’re running with dozens of background processes and apps open, so that’s okay … the gray color of the line shows the overclocking potential we should have with this processor.
More cores, more threads
The trend in the development of modern processor design is towards an increasing number of process cores and threads, as more cores and threads means being able to perform a greater number of tasks simultaneously, which usually results in (although not always as it depends on the software being supported) in better raw performance. Simultaneous multithreading (HyperThreading on Intel and SMT on AMD) allows each physical core to be able to run multiple threads at the same time, so the more threads it has, the better the performance.
However, the number of cores seems to be growing faster than the ability of applications to use them, which is why today there are programs and games that still do not benefit from the large amounts of threads they have from the most common processors. modern and most powerful.
A modern CPU benchmark should demonstrate the benefits of having more cores and threads by scaling beyond 16 threads (for this reason, the 3DMark test offers up to 16 threads directly, but is also able to measure performance with the maximum that your processor supports, anyway. maximum is). It should also show how a processor works for games and other real world activities where performance rarely extends beyond a modest number of cores and threads, and that is today 8 cores are practically the norm, and going further is only within the reach of the lucky ones.
It is not possible to represent these two aspects of a processor performance with a single number, another kind of benchmark is needed, and for this reason 3DMark offers these performance numbers broken down into different performance levels, so that the performance can be compared to the performance of the same processor when using one, two, four, eight, sixteen and N threads (where N is the maximum that the processor supports, whatever that maximum, as we mentioned earlier).