Kribibench 3D rendering
Kribibench uses an SSE-aware, software-only rendering engine to generate some very nice looking 3D images. Since rendering is easily parallelizable, Kribibench is multithreaded, too. We've tested with a couple of different 3D scenes, just in case there are any big differences in terms of rendering workload between them.

Kribibench's renderer just screams on the Pentium 4, especially with Hyper-Threading in the picture. The Barton's larger cache does help its performance in this test, but not by a lot.

Cinebench 2000 3D rendering

This Cinema 4D application test shows a little more balanced picture than Kribibench. Barton's cache is useful in the Cinema 4D shading test, but not in the ray-tracing test. This is one case where Hyper-Threading makes the difference between the Pentium 4 falling behind or coming out on top. (For the Pentium 4 systems with HT, I reported the multi-threaded score from Cinebench, since it was fastest.)

POV-Ray 3D rendering
Next up is that old staple of our test suite, POV-Ray. Oddly, the POV-Ray renderer is apparently not multi-threaded at all, even in the new version 3.5. The new version does make some use of SSE2 instructions, it seems, but nothing too extensive. Anyhow, here are the results from our usual scene render...

The Athlon's floating-point unit has always served it well here. Again, Barton's extra cache isn't any help, though.