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.

I've omitted results for the value processors here.

The Athlon XP is hard to beat in POV-Ray, even with newly compiled binaries, because the Athlon's floating-point unit is a monster. The next scene, chess2.pov, is even more complex than the first.

Now we're talking real differences. The Athlon XP 1900+ finishes rendering this scene over 100 seconds before the Pentium 4 2GHz, even when the P4 is running a specially optimized executable.

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.

Once again, the Athlon XP 1900+ is just a little bit faster than the 1800+ model.