Intel's Pentium 4 2.4GHz: Taking the Lead

3D Rendering Performance 3D Studio MAX 4.2.6 Waterfall.max (Rendered Images per Hour - Higher is better)

AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 54.5 54.5 51.4 51.4 48.0 46.8 44.4 44.4 43.9 38.7 35.3 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 33 | 44 | 55 | 65

The Athlon has historically done very well in 3D rendering applications because of their dependency on raw x87 FP calculations and limited use of SIMD instructions. With the speed bump to 2.4GHz however, the Pentium 4 is able to match the performance of the Athlon XP 2100+.

Just as we mentioned in our 2100+ Review, it did take a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 in order to provide equal performance to that seen on the Athlon XP curve.

3D Rendering Performance Maya 4.0.1 Rendertest (Rendered Images per Hour - Higher is better)

Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 41.4 40.9 39.6 39.1 36.7 36.4 34.6 33.6 33.3 30.8 27.1 | 0 | 8 | 17 | 25 | 33 | 41 | 50

The situation doesn't change much under Maya; although the 2.4GHz CPU gains a slight numerical advantage over the XP 2100+, that doesn't translate into much of a real world performance difference.