Intel's Pentium 4 2.80GHz - Moving to the Head of the Class

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 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.60GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz (400MHz) 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) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) 109.3 114.5 118.3 120.5 122.8 126.2 126.2 133.0 136.6 139.9 148.7 149.4 164.3 170.3 177.1 183.0 191.4 198.9 | 0 | 40 | 80 | 119 | 159 | 199 | 239

3D Rendering Performance - Lightwave 7.5 Radiosity Reflective Things Benchmark - Render Time in Seconds (lower is better) Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.60GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.50GHz (400MHz) 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) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) 53.0 55.5 57.2 58.2 59.2 61.2 61.2 64.6 66.4 72.0 94.4 100.2 110.6 114.9 119.2 123.5 129.1 134.2 | 0 | 27 | 54 | 81 | 107 | 134 | 161

In both tests the 2.80GHz Pentium 4 does some serious damage; we also see that in most 3D rendering applications there's not much of a benefit seen from moving to the 533MHz FSB because of the relatively small size of the working dataset.