How Many CPU Cores Do You Need?

Application Benchmarks: 2D And 3D Graphics

Moving on to graphics applications, let's see how Adobe Photoshop deals with multiple CPU cores:

The answer seems to be that it doesn't deal with them at all. This is a strange result for such popular software, although we admit that we aren't running the newest version of Photoshop, CS4. But the results still aren't inspiring.

Let's try some 3D rendering with Autodesk 3ds Max:

It turns out that Autodesk 3ds Max loves multiple processors when rendering. This functionality has been part of 3ds Max since its early days in a DOS environment, because 3D rendering took so long that it was necessary to split the workload over a network to multiple computers. Once again, we have an application where quad-cores are extremely desirable.