Raytracing, Kribi Bench
Realstorm's Raytracing benchmark has always been the domain of the powerful FPUs present on AMD's CPUs. It doesn't appear to be optimised for the P4's SSE2 architecture. The SN85G4 continues to impress.
The opposite is true with Kribi Bench. Heavy optimisations, a couple of words that haunt the graphics card industry, help keep the P4 miles ahead. The benchmark can be downloaded from here and features models with 16.7 billion polygons. This test is the rather easier JetShadow model with the realistic setting. The gain from K7 to K8 is significant.
We reviewed the Shuttle AN50R full-size nForce3 150 motherboard in a roundup recently. One of its apparent faults lay with the Silicon Image SATA controller. The burst speed, as measured by HD Tach 2.61, was consistently below 50MB/s. That doesn't seem to be the case with the SN85G4's Sil3512A 2-port controller. The burst speed of a 120GB Seagate native SATA drive was recorded at just over 86MB/s, which is in line with results obtained from the ICH5R, VT8237 and Sil3114A SATA controllers present on other motherboards.
