X-bit labs

Meeting First Socket 939 Processors: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ and Athlon 64 3500+ (page 10)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 06/01/2004 | 07:59 AM ]

Adobe Photoshop

I guess Adobe Photoshop CS 8.0, the popular image-processing software suite, needs no introductions. We paid special attention to tests in this program. For our tests, we used a slightly modified PSBench 7 with a 100MB image.

The final performance rating is the geometric mean of the times it took to perform various typical operations. In the diagram below, the results are given in seconds. That is, a smaller number means higher speed.

And the following table shows the speeds of applying various filters of Photoshop CS 8.0 on the tested systems. The results are given in seconds:

The Prescott-core processor from Intel took more first places than any other CPU. Although the use of the dual-channel memory controller helps the Athlon 64 in the Socket 939 form-factor to show a higher performance, it is still not enough to shine brightly in Photoshop.

3D rendering

This section of our testing session is dedicated to final rendering as performed in the popular 3ds max 6 suite.

The Pentium 4 models endowed with Hyper-Threading technology are the best at rendering one frame. This technology helped the Intel processors to speed up exactly in such types of tasks. The Athlon 64, regrettably, cannot boast any technologies and its results are somewhat worse. Note also that the amount of L2 cache memory and the speed of the memory subsystem don’t affect the result seriously. This explains why the Athlon 64 3500+ and the Athlon 64 3400+, as well as the Athlon 3800+ and Athlon 64 FX-53 run neck and neck in this tests.

When we go over from rendering one frame to rendering a frame sequence, we get quite difference numbers. We rendered 30 initial frames of the Ape.max animation, coming with 3ds max. Again, the amount of L2 cache memory and the speed of the memory subsystem don’t affect the result much, but all the Athlon 64 family processors feel much more confident here. For example, the new Athlon 64 3800+ is faster than the top-end Pentium 4 models at rendering this animation.