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 of time constraints, I've omitted results for the value processors here.

The Athlon XP continues the Athlon's tradition of handling older, legacy code well. Here, the original compiled version of POV-Ray is markedly slower, but the Athlon XP 1800+ manages to render the scene about 24 seconds faster than the Pentium 4 does. With the newer, recompiled versions, the Pentium 4 puts in a respectable showing, but the Athlon XP still comes out on top.

The chess2 scene is quite a bit more intensive than our first POV-Ray scene. Objects in chess2 reflect light realistically through ray tracing, and as a result, the scene takes much longer to render, even at the same resolution. And here the Athlon XP does even better, as all the faster Athlons bunch up near the top of the chart. The Athlon's superscalar, fully pipelined floating point unit is nearly a force of nature.

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.

You were expecting something else? :)