Performance: Rendering

As soon as Pentium 4 processors acquired Hyper-Threading support, their performance in 3ds max 5.1 final rendering grew up significantly. Neither Athlon XP, nor the new Opteron can compete with the top Intel Pentium 4 models.

In Lightwave 7.5 the situation is a little different. This application uses SSE2 instructions very actively that is why Opteron processor supporting this instructions set almost catches up with the fastest Pentium 4 processors.

However, SSE2 is not so actively used for rendering of all scenes. Therefore, sometimes Opteron may yield quite tangibly not only to Pentium 4 but also to Athlon XP processor.