3D rendering
3D rendering was one area where we really expected the QX6700 to show everything a clean set of heels, but clearly Realstorm 2004 isn’t optimised for a quartet of cores. Nevertheless, Intel’s Core Microarchitecture is clearly superior to AMD64, with the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 quad-core trouncing most Athlon 64s, and only the Q6400 slightly behind the Athlon 64 FX-62. The Pentium D, of course, is far behind.
Cinebench and Pov-ray are fully multithreaded renderers, and it really shows. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 crushes all before it, with even the lowly Q6400 running at 2.13GHz outperforming the X6800 running at 2.93GHz, thanks to its two extra cores. With the superiority of Intel’s Core Microarchitecture over AMD’s Athlon 64 as well, there’s no desktop processor to beat the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 right now for CPU 3D rendering. Only Intel’s own Woodcrest Xeons will give it anything to worry about.
