Intel Pentium 4 6XX Sequence and 3.73GHz Extreme Edition Processors
3D Rendering - 3ds max 7 and Multitasking
3ds max, otherwise known as 3D Studio Max, is a 3D Modeling and Rendering suite that is widely used by DCC (digital content creation) professionals around the world. It is a very popular tool suite in 3D animation for game developers and offers leading-edge features such as the creation of normal maps and utilizing DX9 shaders.
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In this benchmark we load up a 3D-modeled ape character that is rendered in a six-pass workload, with times recorded down to the second.
Note: P4 3.46GHz EE=Gallatin Core | P4 3.73GHz=Prescott 2M Core
Once again clock speed is the largest influence on this test, in terms of Pentium 4 performance, with the repeatable exception of the P4EE 3.46GHz chip and its shorter pipelined core. The Pentium 4 EE 3.73GHz chip is about 4% faster than the Athlon FX-55, and the 3.6GHz P4 660 and 560 are about 7% faster than an Athlon 64 4000+ in 3ds max.
Next we fired up our own little multitasking scenario and proceeded to re-render the same model in 3ds max but this time with our Lame MP3 conversion running simultaneously in the background. The results may surprise you.
This is a very interesting test because it shows you the balanced smoothness of Intel's Hyper-Threading technology in action. In an effort to keep this chart easy on the eyes, we've only included scores versus the Athlon 64s, from the newest Pentium 4 that are featured in this article. As you can see, although the Athlon 64 FX-55 and 4000+ drop in with fastest 3ds max scores, they also posted significantly longer Lame MP3 recording times, which if you were paying attention on the previous page, you'll note are actually double that of our single-threaded Lame MP3 test. What we're witnessing here from the Pentium 4 camp is a significantly more balanced allocation of processing resources dedicated to both our 3D Studio Max and MP3 encoding workloads. If you multitask--and let's face it, unless you're gaming, who doesn't?--these new Pentium 4 6XX Sequence and Extreme Edition CPUs are quite adept at keeping things on an even keel, more so than the Athlon 64.
