Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz: One step closer

3D Rendering & Animation Performance

We first introduced our 3D Studio MAX R4 test with our 760MP Review.  Click here for more information on the test and our test animation.  We have also added Truespace 4.2 to our test suite using the publicly available Truespace benchmark. 

The Athlon’s powerful FPU gives it the rendering horsepower necessary to come out on top in this rendering performance test.  Our relatively simple animation took 16.4 minutes to render at 320 x 240 on a 1.4GHz Athlon; you can only imagine what some of the more complex/higher resolution animations require in terms of CPU power to get similar results. 

Even at 2GHz the Pentium 4 cannot compete with the x87 FPU power of the Athlon processor; this is a case in which heavier Pentium 4 optimizations are necessary in order to improve performance, not necessarily a higher clock speed.

The Truespace 4.2 benchmark gives us slightly different results from what we just saw with 3D Studio MAX; of course we are dealing with a different application with a completely different set of optimizations.  The Pentium 4 does a lot better here; at 1.8GHz it offers a 14% performance advantage over the Athlon at 1.4GHz, and overclocked at 2.0GHz the Pentium 4 is the fastest setup in the test. 

However the most interesting thing to look at here isn’t the solid performance of the Pentium 4, but rather the difference between the Athlon MP and the Athlon processors.  The frame rate on the 1.2GHz Athlon MP setup was actually 40% higher than on the same setup but with a regular Athlon 1.2.

The difference between the Truespace test and the 3DSMAX test is that the Truespace benchmark actually moves you through a Truespace scene while the 3DSMAX test is just raw FPU calculations required for rendering an animation to an AVI file.  If this is the type of situation that would cause the Athlon MP’s enhancements to come in handy then we should see similar results in another situation where you have a camera moving around a scene: 3D games.