Compute Benchmarks

While most of you are looking at video cards for gaming performance, there are always a few that need them for work or hobbies or you might do both, gaming and various PC workloads that take advantage of GPU Compute. So I like to take a look at compute performance as well. My first test is using Passmark’s Performance Test 9 wherein their GPU test suite I run just the GPU Compute test. The Gaming Z did pull ahead of the 2060 Founders Edition by a small amount here and that was just enough to push it over the 1070 Founders Edition and frankly, it isn’t far from the 2070 as well.

My next test is in Cinegy where their benchmark tests rendering performance across a very high number of file formats and resolutions. The overall average is where they get their score. Now a few of their tests still don’t work with RTX cards so the RTX cards come in a little lower than they should here. It is even worse for AMD cards, there are enough Nvidia focused file formats that fail on the AMD cards that they don’t compile a score at all. The Gaming Z ended up right in between the two RTX 2070 cards, but really all of the RTX cards are right in the same small range due to the missing tests.

So Blender is one of the most popular compute benchmarks both for GPUs and CPUs and it is also a hugely popular 3D rendering program. Here I use the stock benchmark which tests using two tests, timed so the lower the score the better. In the past, this didn’t run with RTX cards so I have had to skip it, but I found that you can download the benchmark and then replace the blender program files inside with the latest beta build that does support RTX. I did this to finally get RTX results, hopefully soon the RTX support will reach the normal build and with that the benchmark as well. Here the 2060 Gaming Z edged out the 2060 Founders Edition with its higher clock speed, but this wasn’t enough to make any headway on catching up to the RTX 2070 that was above it. That said both 2060’s outperformed the GTX 1080 Ti and nothing except the Vega 64 didn’t keep up with any of the RTX cards.

In Basemark GPU I ran all three formats to get a look at them all, but Vulkan outperformed across all of the cards but didn’t really match up on anything else when it came to comparing from card to card, unless the Gaming Z is actually faster than the RTX 2080 Ti lol. That said the 2060 Gaming Z did gain a little over the Founders Edition.

Lastly, I ran Geekbench 4, specifically its GPU Compute test in OpenGL. The two RTX 2060’s were right with each other but the extra clock speed on the Gaming Z didn’t help here. The Founders Edition was still faster, if only by a small amount.