3D Rendering

Mental Ray is the crème of the crop as far as 3D rendering programs go. We only had access to a 32-bit version of the renderer for Linux and Windows, so we used that for this portion of the benchmark. We used Mental Ray 3.3.1 for this particular benchmark. You may view the scene that we rendered in our analysis here. Our results have changed since the last review because we are running the benchmark from the CLI instead of inside Maya. We have found that the results are more consistent when we run the benchmark this way.

Rendering time, lower is better.

Mental Ray 3.3.1


Mental ray seems optimized for NVIDIA, but it does not seem to provide a distinct advantage going from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture.

POV-RAY

Although POV-RAY is limited in application (particularly when compared against Mental Ray), it does provide a free open source solution for basic rendering. POV-Ray 3.50c was our choice of render engine for this benchmark. For benchmark specifics, we run the exact benchmark as specified by the POV-Ray official site.

Render Time in Second, less is better.

POV-Ray 3.50c


Oddly, we saw the KT800 Pro in 64-bit SuSE overtake its NVIDIA counterpart here. When retesting this benchmark, we typically found a tolerance of about 4%, which is higher than most of our other benchmarks. However, the 64-bit K8T800 board always pulled ahead (and in this case, by 90 seconds).

Encoding Tests Gaming Tests
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  • mjz5 - Monday, July 19, 2004 - link

    another reason to go the AMD route instead of intel
  • JasonClark - Monday, July 19, 2004 - link

    Wacky javascript links? Javascript is a standard, and with the popup manager in firefox/mozilla I don't see the issue. Enable popups for the site and your done.
  • Gholam - Monday, July 19, 2004 - link

    Eh, I'm writing this in Firefox :)

    Anyway, nice results. Looks like 64-bit support in applications is what it will take for A64 to battle P4 on it's remaining home turf (encoding). Then again, it'd be interesting to see these benchmarks include Nocona.
  • gherald - Monday, July 19, 2004 - link

    I find it annoying that I can never seem to get this comments page to loads in Mozilla Firefox, the Linux browser of choice.

    If you're going to write articles about Linux, at least design your site in such a way that it doesn't use wacky javascript popups.

    Personally, I think you should just make it a normal web link and be done with it.

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