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By, Marco Chiappetta
January 6, 2004
 Our next batch of testing will
focus on professional 3D rendering performance. For the first test, we
used the latest version of SPECviewperf, v7.1. SPECviewperf is a program used to test a workstation's OpenGL rendering performance
with 6 different modules. This benchmark shows significant performance gains with increased overall system bandwidth. SPECBench.Org explains what
SPECviewperf does to test performance.
"Viewperf parses command lines and data files, sets the rendering state, and converts data sets to a format that can be traversed using OpenGL rendering calls. It renders the data set for a pre-specified amount of time or number of frames with animation between frames. Finally, it outputs the results."  | | SPECviewperf v7.1 Performance Tests | | The Dancing Jugglers Return! | |
Each module, except the ugs-03 and light-06
modules, show the 3.2GHz Pentium 4 and the Athlon XP 3200+ with
performance advantages over the Athlon 64s. We've come to learn that
the nForce 3 is the cause of the Athlon 64's relatively poor performance in
this benchmark though, so don't be too put off by the results. When
tested on a VIA K8T800 board,
like Asus' SK8V, the A64s perform much better. When the A64's are
compared to each other, the 3400+ traded victories with the much more
expensive FX-51. | | |
KribiBench v1.1 Performance Tests | | 3D Modeling Tests | |
Next up, we used
Adept Development's KribiBench
benchmark. KribiBench is an SSE aware software renderer, similar to
the CPU test in 3DMark03. A 3D
model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frames per
second are reported. We used two of the included models with this
benchmark; an Office model consisting of 42K polygons and a gigantic "Ultra" model that is comprised of over 16G (million) polygons!
With KribiBench's Office model, the Athlon 64
3400+ outran both of the 3200s, but the 3.2GHz Pentium 4 and FX-51 were in a
league of their own. The 3.2GHz P4 topped the FX-51 by about 8%, which
surpassed the Athlon 64 3400+ by 20.1%. With the far more taxing Ultra
model, the 3400+ and FX-51 performed similarly, with only .003 FPS
separating them, but the P4 pulled way ahead, besting both of them by nearly
35%. | | | Cinebench 2003 Performance Tests | | 3D Modeling Tests | |
The Cinebench 2003 benchmark is
an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test, based on the commercially available
Cinema 4D application. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware
benchmark that renders a single 3D scene. The time it took each test
system to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below (listed
in seconds).
The Pentium 4 had a significant performance
advantage in the Cinebench 2003 benchmark as well, finishing the scene 5.2
seconds ahead of the Athlon 64 FX-51. The Athlon 64 3400+ also
performed well in this test, coming in a little less than 2 seconds behind
the second place finisher, the FX-51. We should also mention that this
benchmark recognizes HyperThreading enabled P4s at 2 separate CPUs. If
we ran this test in dual-CPU mode, the P4 finished rendering the scene in
only 68 seconds. Some Gaming Scores & The Conclusion | 
