Testing Procedure: Peculiarities, Continued
The picture shows the test system set-up for all the AMD Athlon XP processors.
The picture shows the test system set-up for all the Intel Pentium 4 processors.
Benchmarks: 19 Rigorous Tests
| OpenGL Performance | Quake 3 Arena "Demo 1" and "NV15 Demo" |
| Direct3D Performance | 3D Mark 2000 and 3D Mark 2001 |
| 3D Rendering | Cinema 4D XL R6 "Shading" |
| 3D Rendering | SPECviewperf "Lightscape" |
| MP3 Audio Encoding | Lame MP3 Encoder |
| MPEG-2 Video Encoding | Pinnacle Studio 7 |
| MPEG-4 Video Encoding | Flask Mpeg 0.6 and DivX 4.02 codec |
| Office Performance | Sysmark 2001 |
| Archiving | WinACE 2.04 |
| Compiling Linux Kernel | Suse Linux 7.3 (Kernel 2.4.13) |
| SiSoft Sandra 2001 | CPU and Multimedia Bench |
Since we want to convey the widest spectrum possible of practical benchmarks, we performed all the tests under Windows XP and completely re-configured the tests. In total, we used 19 different benchmarks in order to obtain the most complete, the most well-balanced view of how each individal AMD and Intel processor performs. We continued to determine OpenGL performance using four different Quake tests - Direct3D performance from the DirectX package is determined using the 3D Mark 2000 (Direct X 7) and the 3D Mark 2001 (DirectX8). The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks portray a comprehensive testing scenario - the Lame MP3 Encoder was used to encode a 178 MB Wav file into "MPEG-1 Layer 3 Format." Still a classic, our MPEG-4 test converts a file from a DVD film into MPEG-4 format using Flask Mpeg and DivX codec. A new addition to our benchmark suite is MPEG-2 file encoding using the video editing software "Pinnacle Studio 7."
