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More of the professional kind and a lot more expensive than Amorphium or Caligari TrueSpace, 3DSMax comes with a number of benchmarking files for either ray tracing or animations. Animations depend on the graphics card for real-time rendering, whereas still images only stress the CPU and, eventually, the memory subsystem.

       

Left to right: Singlepipe - CBalls - Underwater_environment_finished (click thumbnails for larger images)

Runtime in seconds, lower is better: In 3DSMax 5.0, the AMD CPUs both get whopped

As it turns out, the "SinglePipe" result is not an isolated coincidence. However, the P4 has always been very strong in scenes with a lot of texturing, that is, integer load and, for example, the Underwater scene requires no less than five complete rendering passes.

On the other hand, this is only one application within the feature set of 3DSMax 5.0 and there is a lot more to the program than rendering still images, which is why we are going to look at the 3DSMax benchmark created by the "Standard Performance Evaluation Company" or short SPEC

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