3ds max rendering
We begin our 3D rendering tests with Discreet's 3ds max, one of the best known 3D animation tools around. 3ds max is both multithreaded and optimized for SSE2. We rendered a couple of different scenes at 1024x751 resolution, including the Island scene shown below. Our testing techniques were very similar to those described in this article by Greg Hess. In all cases, the "Enable SSE" box was checked in the application's render dialog.

Both flavors of Pentium 4 perform well in 3ds max. However, the Athlon 64 seems to scale very well with clock speed, as the Athlon 64 FX-53's strong finishes indicate. The trend seems to indicate the Athlon 64 will surpass the Pentium in a speed grade or two.