Valve VRAD map compilation
This next test processes a map from Half-Life 2 using Valve Software's VRAD lighting tool. Valve uses VRAD to precompute lighting that goes into games like Half-Life 2. This isn't a real-time process, and it doesn't reflect the performance one would experience while playing a game. It does, however, show how multiple CPU cores can speed up game development.

VRAD only uses four threads, and it shows in the results, as the higher-clocked Xeon 5160s outperform the Xeon 5355s. Once again, the Opterons look overmatched.

SiSoft Sandra Mandelbrot
Next up is SiSoft's Sandra system diagnosis program, which includes a number of different benchmarks. The one of interest to us is the "multimedia" benchmark, intended to show off the benefits of "multimedia" extensions like MMX, SSE, and SSE2. According to SiSoft's FAQ, the benchmark actually does a fractal computation:

This benchmark generates a picture (640x480) of the well-known Mandelbrot fractal, using 255 iterations for each data pixel, in 32 colours. It is a real-life benchmark rather than a synthetic benchmark, designed to show the improvements MMX/Enhanced, 3DNow!/Enhanced, SSE(2) bring to such an algorithm.

The benchmark is multi-threaded for up to 64 CPUs maximum on SMP systems. This works by interlacing, i.e. each thread computes the next column not being worked on by other threads. Sandra creates as many threads as there are CPUs in the system and assignes [sic] each thread to a different CPU.

We're using the 64-bit version of Sandra. The "Integer x16" version of this test uses integer numbers to simulate floating-point math. The floating-point version of the benchmark takes advantage of SSE2 to process up to eight Mandelbrot iterations in parallel.

The Intel Core microarchitecture's ability to execute 128-bit floating-point SSE instructions in a single clock cycle gives it a pronounced edge over the Opterons here, and having eight of those, err, Core cores in one system is a sight to behold.

Windows Media Encoder x64 Edition
I had hoped to use QuickTime Pro to do some high-definition H.264 encoding, but QuickTime apparently maxes out at two threads. Windows Media Encoder works fine with at least four threads, though, and comes in a 64-bit version. For this test, I asked Windows Media Encoder to transcode a 153MB 1080-line widescreen video into a 720-line WMV using its built-in DVD/Hardware profile.

This application just barely makes use of more than 50% of the dual Xeon 5355 system's CPU time, but it's enough to give that system an edge over the dual Xeon 5160s. The Opterons finish over two minutes behind the Xeons.