VIA's P4X266: The Pentium 4 gets DDR

3D Rendering & Animation Performance

Here we have two tests: a 3D Studio MAX rendering test and the SPECviewperf benchmark suite.  The 3D Studio MAX rendering test stresses the CPU and memory subsystems while the SPECviewperf suite stresses those two areas as well as the graphics card (in this case, a GeForce3). 

It's obvious that our test scene was not large/complex enough to require more storage outside of the Pentium 4's 256KB L2 cache.  The result of this is that all three platforms perform about the same, in spite of vastly different memory bandwidth capabilities. 

Things aren't so simple in the SPECviewperf tests, as the sample sets are large enough to be memory bandwidth bound.  Some tests such as the ProCDRS-03 viewset are limited by the GeForce3 GPU, while others such as AWadvs-04 are influenced tremendously by memory bandwidth.