POV-Ray 3D rendering
POV-Ray is a freeware software ray-tracing program that creates high-quality 3D scenes. It's also a very useful measure of a processor's performance, particularly on floating-point math. Our POV-Ray tests use the original release of POV-Ray 3.1, plus Steve Schmitt's recompiled versions, just to see what difference the various compilers and compiler settings can make.

The recompiled POV-Ray comes in two flavors: "PIII" and "P4". Both were produced with Intel C v. 5.0. The "PIII" version doesn't use any instructions proprietary to Intel processors or to the PIII; it runs just fine on the Athlon and the P4. The "P4" version uses a small bit of SSE2 code, but it doesn't take advantage of the P4's SIMD capabilities. I've indicated which version of POV-Ray was used in the graphs below next to the processor/speed labels, so it should be easy to track.

Also, because the graphs were getting big enough already, I've again omitted results for the 1.6GHz Pentium 4.

With optimizations, the 1.4GHz Athlon is the overall leader, especially in the compute-intensive chess2 test. All of the processors benefit from optimizations, but the Pentium 4 most of all. Putting it another way, one could say the P4 performs relatively weakest with legacy code. The PIII 1.2GHz can't get much higher than middle of the pack, even with optimizations. However, it splits the difference with the 1.8GHz Pentium 4 when using the original version of POV-Ray. In all, the PIII's floating-point performance is still impressive, but the newer designs have it beat.

LAME MP3 encoding
LAME is the encoder of choice around Damage Labs for high-quality output, so this test holds some interest for me. More speed for MP3 encoding is always good. However, to keep it fair, we've avoided the newer builds of LAME that incorporate support for the Athlon's 3DNow! instructions.

Here again, the PIII is a little weak in a multimedia-related task. Unlike some other multimedia-oriented tasks, in our experience, this test doesn't benefit much at all from extra memory bandwidth; it's almost entirely CPU-bound.