AMD's 760MPX Chipset - Multiprocessor for the Masses

3D Rendering & Animation Performance

Time is money and for most professionals using 3D rendering applications like Maya and 3D Studio MAX, we're talking about a lot of money. 3D rendering is inherently very cache and FPU intensive and depending on the size of the scene being rendered, it can be very memory bandwidth intensive as well. Luckily the more advanced 3D rendering and animation programs do a great job of splitting up the difficult work among multiple CPUs making the upgrade to dual CPUs more than worth it.

We used two benchmarks to categorize the 3D rendering & animation performance of these platforms - Maya 4.0.1 using the Maya-Testcenter's rendertest and 3D Studio MAX 4.26 using our own benchmark from the original 760MP article. Note that you can't compare these numbers to the previous 3D Studio MAX numbers because of the fact that we're using a newer version of the software (4.26 vs 4.02) which boasts improved SSE and SSE2 support.

3D Rendering Performance Maya 4.0.1 (Rendered Images per Hour - Greater is Better) AMD Athlon MP 1900+ (1.6GHz) AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz Intel Xeon 1.7GHz 54.5 44.4 42.4 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 33 | 44 | 55 | 65

The upgrade to dual Athlon MP 1900+ CPUs results in an increase of about 22% in terms of rendered images per hour. The difference between the dual Athlon MP 1.2 and the dual Xeon 1.7 systems is about 5%.

We'd expect a pair of Xeons running at 2GHz to approach but not exceed the performance of the dual Athlon MP 1900+.

3D Rendering Performance 3D Studio MAX 4.26 (Render Time in Minutes - Lower is Better) AMD Athlon MP 1900+ (1.6GHz) AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz Intel Xeon 1.7GHz 6.1 7.9 8.33 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 7 | 8 | 10

We see almost identical performance gaps here under 3D Studio MAX. Even with the latest patch for the software with improved Pentium 4 optimizations cannot give the Xeon the performance edge it needs.