Cinebench rendering
Graphics is a classic example of a computing problem that's easily parallelizable, so it's no surprise that we can exploit a multi-core processor with a 3D rendering app. Cinebench is the first of those we'll try, a benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D rendering engine. It's multithreaded and comes with a 64-bit executable. This test runs with just a single thread and then with as many threads as CPU cores are available.

Have a look at the scores for the Athlon 64 FX-74 and the Phenom 9900. Although the FX-74 has a 400MHz clock frequency advantage, the Phenom 9900's single-threaded score is almost as high. That's a nice per-clock performance advancement. Then check out the multithreaded results, where the Phenom 9900 easily scales better than the FX-74 and ends up producing a higher score overall. Those improvements aren't sufficient to allow the 9600 to catch the Q6600, though.

POV-Ray rendering
We caved in and moved to the beta version of POV-Ray 3.7 that includes native multithreading. The latest beta 64-bit executable is still quite a bit slower than the 3.6 release, but it should give us a decent look at comparative performance, regardless.

The pendulum swings the other way in POV-Ray's chess2 scene, where the Phenom 9600 finishes 21 seconds ahead of the Q6600 and the Phenom 9900 bests Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6850. Intel's new 45nm Penryn-based Intel processors are faster still, however.

The benchmark scene is largely a single-threaded affair, which helps explains the Phenom's relatively slow performance.

3ds max modeling and rendering

The DirectX test is more of a modeling session than a rendering test, so we have a little of each here. Even the Phenom 9900 can't catch the Core 2 Quad Q6600 in either test.