Zotac's Ion: The World's First mini-ITX Ion Board

3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test

Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:

Once again the Atom 330 is able to equal the performance of the Celeron 420 in our 3dsmax test thanks to its multi-threaded nature and the Atom 330's ability to work on four threads at once. Ion isn't any faster than a conventional Atom platform in this case either.

Blender 2.48a

Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.

Blender gains an advantage on Ion thanks to its faster GPU (Blender seems to be impacted by GPU as well as CPU speed). The advantage amounts to 7.5% but it's there nonetheless.

Cinebench R10

Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.

Our Cinebench results sum up the Atom vs. Celeron debate pretty well. When working on a single thread, the Celeron is significantly faster; in this case over 2x the speed of the Atom processor. Throw more threads at the CPUs and the Atom's threading advantage works in its favor, the 330 can deliver performance greater than a Celeron 420.

POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.

I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.