Professional DCC and CAD/CAM Applications
Alias Maya 7 - mental ray Render 1080p
We render a custom scene here to HD resolution, using the 32-bit CPU-based Mental Ray renderer that ships with Maya 7. If you've never come across Maya before, here's what Alias, it's creators, have to say about it: "Academy Award® winning Maya® software is the world's most powerfully integrated 3D modeling, animation, effects, and rendering solution. Maya also adds to the quality and realism of 2D graphics. That's why film and video artists, game developers, visualization professionals, Web and print designers turn to Maya to realize their creative vision." It's quite the heavyweight in the DCC industry.
5160 beats 285 by 10% or so. While the recently released Opteron 290 would fare better, of course, its extra 200MHz wouldn't quite take it past the new Core-powered Xeon hardware.
mental ray Standalone 64-bit
There's also a standalone version of the mental ray rendering engine with a 64-bit binary collection, so we test that too with a different scene. mental ray just loves to chew up as many CPU cores as you can throw at it.
Running a native 64-bit version of mental ray has different results, the Opterons the winner by around 3%, clawing back what was lost under the 32-bit render core tested above.
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0
Pro/ENGINEER is one of the stalwarts, if not the stalwart, of the CAD/CAM industry as far as software goes. We use a freely available benchmark trail to enable Pro/ENGINEER to abuse CPU cores.
Opteron is quicker in Pro/E, showing that it's not all microarch dependant in terms of performance wins. We try and stress that software has just as large an effect on performance as the underlying hardware that runs the codes, where the software execution maps better to particular hardware.
What's good to note here is that the new Xeon hardware turns around a huge performance deficit in Pro/E that Paxville gave up to Opteron last time we tested.
