Intel Celeron 1.7GHz - Pentium 4 Powered

3D Rendering Performance

Next we have our usual two 3D rendering tests. We'll start off with rendering the first frame of the Waterfall.max scene (provided on the 3DSMAX CD) at 1024x768:

3D Rendering Performance 3D Studio MAX 4.2.6 Waterfall.max (Rendered Images per Hour - Higher is better) AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Duron 1.3GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Pentium III 1.2 Intel Celeron 1.2GHz Intel Celeron 1.7 @ 2.26GHz Intel Celeron 1.7GHz 44.4 42.9 39.1 37.5 34.0 33.3 30.3 25.9 | 0 | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 44 | 53

The vast majority of rendering tasks under 3D Studio MAX are not blessed with SSE2 optimizations so you end up paying the ultimate price when you attempt to render scenes on lower clocked NetBurst based processors. Because of Intel's decision to sacrifice raw x87 floating point execution power in favor of beefing up SSE2 execution potential, applications such as 3D Studio MAX don't perform all too well on the lower clocked processors. As we've seen with the newer Pentium 4s however, as clock speeds increase the performance scales quite well and you end up having very competitive processors. Unfortunately for the Celeron, it will be a while before it enjoys the high clock speeds of the current Pentium 4.

When it comes to raw FP execution power the Athlon has always been king and at a meager 1.4GHz it's spreading its wings wide.

3D Rendering Performance Maya 4.0.1 Rendertest (Rendered Images per Hour - Higher is better) AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Celeron 1.7 @ 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz AMD Duron 1.3GHz Intel Celeron 1.7GHz Intel Pentium III 1.2 Intel Celeron 1.2GHz 34.6 31.6 31.3 27.9 27.3 25.2 25.0 22.4 | 0 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 | 42

The new Celeron does better under Maya than under 3D Studio MAX but still tends to lag behind the Pentium 4 by around 10%; overclocking helps level the playing field a bit.