Now let’s check the performance of the new Athlon XP 3200+ during rendering:

Well, there is nothing to be surprised with. The CPU computational capacity is of primary importance during rendering. Therefore, CPUs with higher core clock defeat those working at lower frequencies no matter how fast their bus is. As for Pentium 4, it owes its extremely high performance to Hyper-Threading technology support, which sometimes allows increasing the processor performance in multi-threaded applications due to more efficient CPU utilization.

We can say absolutely the same thing about the rendering speed in Lightwave 7.5. However, Athlon XP overclocked to 2.4GHz rendered Sunset scene considerably faster than the today’s Pentium 4 processors.

It is a hard task for Athlon XP to compete with Pentium 4 capable of processing two data streams at a time. Unfortunately, AMD doesn’t have the facility to develop and apply technologies similar to Intel’s Hyper-Threading.