P4 vs AMD for LW

[supaslims]

I heard some rumours a while back that Newtek collaborated with Intel while developing LW7...i was skeptical to say the least. Thoug i recently came across these tests. http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020402/p4_2400-12.html

 

Dont know if any of you guys have come across this but it makes for interesting reading for us LW users.

[dwright]

Thanks, I think Tom's hardware has been using LW for benchmarks since he started the website (I think). LW 6.5b was the first to be fully P4 SSE2 complient (almost duplicating the speed on p4's), but LW works great and very fast on AMD based.

[minus]

Yes... Lightwave is *very* optimized for the Pentium 4 SSE2 extensions. The new AMD chips that are 64bit will have the same SSE2 extensions aswell though (and be able to run 32bit apps). But in the mean-time... my dual processor AMD 1900Mhz Machine is only about as fast as a single processor Intel machine that has a 3.06Ghz processor. And in some instances the Intel machine will beat my AMD pretty badly on quick scenes. (where multi-threading isn't involved much).

[Greg Hess]

Lightwaves performance crown definitely falls to the Intel line of processors. (Lightwave also supports hyperthreading, since you can allocate the # of threads per render).

[dwright]

non-Multi-T operations in LW are:

 

- Some AA operations

- Some filters and plugins

- Pre configuring the scene such as optimizing polygons, creating shadow maps, etc

- Others

 

If you really want to use both processors at full time, and have the memory for it, render via screamer net (LWSN) and launch 2, 3 or 4, (or more if scenes are not to complex); each rendering a group of frames. Not only that LWSN is a bit faster, this will really use all your CPU's power for sure.

 

for scenes that are quick, such as 2min/frame scenes, you can launch 8 LWSN's and you will notice how fast things can be done.