Cinebench 2003 lighting and rendering
Cinebench is based on Maxon's Cinema 4D modeling, rendering, and animation app. This new revision of Cinebench measures performance in a number of ways, including 3D rendering, software shading, and OpenGL shading with and without hardware acceleration.

Cinebench 2003 is multithreaded, so it takes advantage of Hyper-Threading. For the P4 3.06 and 3.0GHz systems, I've reported the multithreaded rendering test result, which was always better than the single-threaded result. For the Athlon XP and the other P4 chips, I've reported the single-CPU result.

The Pentium 4's combination of SSE2 and Hyper-Threading proves especially potent in Cinebench's rendering test. The Athlon XP 3200+ shows only a slight gain over the 3000+ model.

The Athlon XP 3200+ puts in a better showing in the two software shading tests, where it just barely fails to outrun the Pentium 4 3.06GHz. In the OpenGL hardware shading test, however, the Athlon XP chips excel.

Kribibench 3D rendering
Kribibench uses an SSE-aware, software-only rendering engine to generate some very nice looking 3D images. 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.

Since rendering is easily parallelizable, SIMD extensions like SSE and multithreaded execution via Hyper-Threading both benefit performance greatly. Kribibench runs very well on the high-end Pentium 4 chips. The Athlon XP 3200+ is slightly faster than the 3000+, but not enough to matter much.

POV-Ray 3D rendering
POV-Ray has been part of our test suite forever, so we'll include it here for the sake of completeness. Even the relatively new 3.5 release of POV-Ray isn't multithreaded and doesn't take much advantage of SIMD extensions, so this test leans on good the ol' x87-style FPU for rendering power.

Here's a rendering test the Athlon XP can win. Oddly enough, though, it's the 3000+ that comes out on top. The difference is easily within our margin of error, though, so no real surprises here.