Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz: The clock strikes two

3D Rendering, Raytracing & Video Encoding Performance

We know for a fact that 3D Studio MAX is very x87 floating point intensive which gives the Athlon the performance advantage over the Pentium 4 2.0GHz. 

A new addition to our performance measurement suite, CINEMA 4D’s Raytracing test closes the gap between the Pentium 4 2.0GHz and the Athlon 1.4GHz.  The two perform approximately the same.

Another newcomer to our test suite is MPEG-4 encoding using Flask.  We used the MMX iDCT algorithm for all of the platforms (on the Pentium 4 the SSE2 iDCT algorithm did not perform any better).  Using the 1.1 patched beta of v0.060 and the DivX 4.0 codec we ran an encode at 352 x 288 of a MPEG-1 source with de-interlacing enabled. 

Here we can see the enhancements of the Palomino core truly flex their muscle as the Athlon MP 1.2 is able to outperform all of the competing solutions including the higher clocked Athlon 1.4GHz part.  It won’t be much longer until the desktop Athlon gains the Palomino enhancements.