The Giga-Battle Part 2

Professional OpenGL Performance - SPECviewperf 6.1.1, Continued

It is pretty obvious that there is something wrong here. I cannot really complain about NVIDIA's 5.08-driver, because it is pre-release, but you can see that it has some issues here. It cannot possibly be that i840 performs worse than i820 in this benchmark. Giga-Athlon and especially Giga-PIII on the Apollo Pro 133A-platform are also scoring by for too bad. Hence I suggest you forget those numbers until the driver has been fixed. I only included them to be complete.

Floating Point Calculation Performance

3D Studio Max Release 1 may not be the latest version anymore, but that has one big advantage. This early version is still fully usable and it is neither using SSE nor 3DNow!. Therefore it is able to show the pure FPU-performance of a processor. The rendering performance in this benchmark does not depend on the platform, because the benchmark is purely running in the processor's L1-cache. That is why I didn't make any difference between the different platforms for each processor, even i840 cannot make a difference here.

Athlon's pure FPU performance is some 33% percent higher than Coppermine's. This might not be important for the average user, but whoever is using scientific software will certainly appreciate Athlon's big performance advantage.