These days there are basically two different groups of customers who demand lots of processing power: content creators and gamers, while this 2D performance comparison is targeting content creators. After having had a look at the following pages you'll have an overview on how fast recent CPUs are in regarding a variety of programs, may it be video encoding,
rendering, ...

PCMark 8 includes tests based on popular Adobe and Microsoft applications. In order to test the max perfomance of our system, we run the Creative benchmark suite in “Conventional” mode without OpenCL acceleration. PCMark 8 Creative benchmark includes workloads typical for enthusiasts and professionals who work in the field of content creation. The score in PCMark 8 Creative is measured in points where higher is better.