Now let’s take a look at the results of the scientific ScienceMark 2.0 test:

Athlon XP used to be fairly considered the best CPU for scientific calculations due to its powerful three-pipeline FPU. Athlon 64 retained this FPU unit also. While the clock frequency dropped. As a result, the newcomer cannot work as fast as its predecessor.

And what about 3D rendering?

Rendering in 3ds max5 is a typical computational task. The architectural improvements introduced in Athlon 64 can’t make up for its low working frequency, just like in scientific tests. As a result, Athlon XP 2800+ shows 12% higher rendering speed than Athlon 64 2800+. Nevertheless, the freshly introduced enhancements in Athlon 64 do pay back in this benchmark, since the clock frequency difference makes over 30%, while the results difference is much lower.

In Lightwave 7.5 the rendering speed depends a lot on the scene type. In some cases Athlon 64 can show its best due to larger L2 cache, SSE2 instructions support and low latency during memory requests. And in other cases it performance gets close to Athlon XP 1.6GHz.

Again, it is about too many calculations and Athlon 64 can’t cope with them successfully. By the way, as soon as Intel introduced Hyper-Threading technology support in its Pentium 4 processors, their performance in rendering applications grew up immensely.