Professsional Applications

As one of the more CPU intensive applications that, furthermore, was geared towards the existing clientele of office users, voice recognition programs were forced to use any kind of optimization possible to squeeze the most out of a system. Voice recognition is extremely CPU intensive and furthermore has been a pet project of Intel with the declared goal to conquer the Asian markets as a workaround for the difficulties to properly enter e.g. Chinese and Japanese language using a standard keyboard. Dragon Software as one of the spearheads in the voice recognition field was one of the first companies to incorporate SSE optimizations into their "Naturally Speaking".

Runtime in seconds, shorter is better. The Palomino (1) comes in first with a 12.8% lead over the Thunderbird (2).

MicroSoft NetShow 3.0

MicroSoft NetShow 3.0 is quite heavily optimized for SSE instructions.

Again, the sore shows the runtime in seconds, shorter is better. The Palomino (1) clearly beats the Thunderbird (2) with a 33.9% margin.

Adobe Systems PhotoDeluxe 3.1 and PhotoShop 5.0

Adobe have been one of the major promoters of SSE optimizations

Here we see an enormous boost in performance of the Palomino over the Thunderbird. Scores, once again, reflect runtime, shorter is better. The delta in PhotoDeluxe 3.1 is a whopping 54.3 % only to be topped by a 66.9 % delta in Photoshop 5.0.

Caligari trueSpace 4.2

trueSpace 4.2 by Caligari is a photorealistic 3D editing program based on the Lightwork Pro rendering engine from Lightwork Design. Features include Hybrid Radiosity, Volumetric Rendering, Adaptive Anti-aliasing, Area and Projector Lights, Anisotropic Reflectance Shaders and others. The interesting aspect of trueSpace is that it can be used in both OpenGL and D3D environment, and, thus, is capable of taking advantage of the latest DX implementations as well as the OpenGL format. aligari truSpace is fully optimized for SSE instructions and incredibly CPU intensive. For example, the K6-2 400 would run the DirectX benchmark at an average speed of less than 1 fps.

Caligari trueSpace D3D benchmark. Scores show average frames per second. The Palomino (1) is almost twice as fast as the Thunderbird (2). The frame rate delta may not even live up to the CPU performance delta since there may be some limitations of the graphics card that put an additional ceiling on the total performance.