X-bit labs

Workstation Processors Duel: AMD Opteron against Intel Xeon (page 20)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/21/2005 | 08:44 PM ]

Lightwave [8]

Lightwave is one more professional 3D graphics application. Here we measured the final rendering speed in two test scenes.

We have already pointed out more than once that final rendering speed in Lightwave depends a lot on the model structure. This proves absolutely true in our today’s test session. However, during the final rendering of both test scenes the result is the same. The first prize is won by the dual-core Opteron CPUs. Dual-core Xeon processors turn into quite an outsider here. It might be the structure of the system bus between the CPU and the chipset (where the memory controller is located) that determined the failure of the Intel processors. The system with two dual-core Xeon CPUs has the bandwidth of 6.4GB/s split between the four physical and eight virtual cores. Therefore, when they all work simultaneously, each core suffers from slow memory subsystem, and even two L2 caches with the overall capacity of 4GB cannot help them out.

CINEBENCH 2003

The special CINEBENCH 2003 test shows how efficient our platforms are in the three-dimensional Cinema 4D software application, which is extremely popular among Mac platform fans.

Systems with dual-core CPUs perform the rendering faster than systems with single-core CPUs. In other words, the results are pretty similar to what we have already seen in 3ds max 7 today. However, despite the fact that the systems with Xeon 3.6GHz and Opteron 254 are only 7% apart, the performance difference between the dual-core platforms is much higher. The workstation with Opteron 275 processors outperforms dual-core Xeon 2.8GHz by over 30%.

As for the work in OpenGL mode, there is no multi-threading supported, so the results are not that interesting for us.