3D modeling and rendering

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 (or threads, in CPUs with multiple hardware threads per core) are available.

POV-Ray rendering
We're using the latest beta version of POV-Ray 3.7 that includes native multithreading and 64-bit support. Some of the beta 64-bit executables have been quite a bit slower than the 3.6 release, but this should give us a decent look at comparative performance, regardless.

3ds max modeling and rendering

Valve VRAD map compilation
This next test processes a map from Half-Life 2 using Valve's VRAD lighting tool. Valve uses VRAD to pre-compute lighting that goes into games like Half-Life 2.

All told, our suite of 3D rendering tests fails to break the stalemate between the Phenom IIs and their Core 2 Quad adversaries. I'm not sure this contest could be any closer.