AMD Athlon XP 2600/2400+ - Introducing Thoroughbred Revision B

3D Rendering Performance using SSE2

While 3ds max 5 is SSE2 optimized, the level of optimization is nowhere near what NewTek reported with Lightwave upon releasing version 7.0b. The performance improvements offered by the new SSE2 optimized version were all above 20% using NewTek's supplied benchmarking scenes.

We chose two benchmarks to use, the least SSE2 optimized one and another that is more optimized just to get an idea of the potential that lies for Pentium 4 users running heavily optimized applications:

3D Rendering Performance - Lightwave 7.5 Raytrace Benchmark - Render Time in Seconds (lower is better) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4BGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz (400MHz) AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) 120.5 126.2 126.2 133.0 136.6 139.9 148.7 149.4 164.3 170.3 177.1 | 0 | 35 | 71 | 106 | 142 | 177 | 213

Even the XP 2600+ is defeated by the 2.2GHz Pentium 4 here, SSE2 optimizations can help the Pentium 4's performance significantly.

3D Rendering Performance - Lightwave 7.5 Radiosity Reflective Things Benchmark - Render Time in Seconds (lower is better) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4BGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz) AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) 58.2 61.2 61.2 64.6 66.4 72.0 94.4 100.2 110.6 114.9 119.2 | 0 | 24 | 48 | 72 | 95 | 119 | 143

With heavy optimizations, even a 2GHz Pentium 4 can outperform the new 2600+.