LAME MP3 encoding
A beta version of LAME is now available with 3DNow! support, but we chose to stick with release 3.70 to keep the footing equal and to measure only FPU performance with this test.

The 1.7GHz Pentium 4 closes to within a second of the 1.2GHz Athlon, but the AMD processors are simply faster here.

SPECviewperf workstation graphics
Now on to our first real-time 3D graphics test. Unlike our gaming tests below, SPEC's viewperf concentrates on the kinds of graphics done on a 3D workstation—CAD/CAM work, 3D modeling, and tasks that use lots and lots of polygons.

As we've seen before with viewperf, the different CPUs vary in their performance, but overall, it's a toss-up.