3D modeling and rendering

3ds max

Now we've ventured firmly into territory where low-power, low-cost CPUs aren't really intended to go. The Nano and Atom systems couldn't complete WorldBench's 3ds max rendering test due to timeout error.

Cinebench

Neither CPU is all that quick in Cinebench, either. Even with Hyper-Threading and multiple render threads, the Atom can't keep up with the Nano.

Valve VRAD map compilation
Next up is a test we picked up during a visit to Valve Software, the developers of the Half-Life games. This test processes a map from Half-Life 2 using Valve'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. Instead, it shows how a faster CPU can speed up game development.

Valve's VRAD is the same story. To give you a point of reference, even the slowest dual-core desktop processor we benchmarked in our last round of tests, the Athlon 64 X2 5600+, finished this job in 326 seconds.