LightWave 9.6

Website: LightWave 9.6

Another commonly used workstation application is Newtek LightWave, which was recently used in ‘Iron Man’ and the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ TV series. We used LightWave 9.6 to render a single frame of animation from the scene developed by 3D Speed Machine.


Disappointingly, the Opteron 2435s were no better than the Opteron 2382s in our Lightwave 9.6 benchmarks, a professional 3D modelling and animation package. According to the task manager, Lightwave 9.6 used all 12 cores of the Opteron 2435 system, so once again we're at a loss to explain this poor result. Regardless, the Xeon W5580s finished this test faster than either Opteron system.

Terragen 2

Website: Terragen 2

Planetside Software’s Terragen 2 is a highly realistic landscape generator; its images have been used as backdrops in films such as ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’ and ‘Stealth’.


Despite Terragen 2 not supporting more than eight threads, the Opteron 2435s outpaced the Opteron 2383s in this test, which renders highly realistic mountainous scene for use as a backdrop in a movie. However, once again, the Xeon W5580s were faster.

To force Terragen 2 to use the physical instead of the logical cores of the W5580s, we ran the test with Hyper-Threading disabled in the BIOS. In this configuration, the Xeon W5580s took a far more respectable eight minutes and 43 seconds, a 15 per cent improvement over the Xeon X5482s.

WPrime32M

Website: WPrime

WPrime is a multi-threaded maths calculation benchmark that counter-intuitively uses square roots rather than prime numbers. The standard benchmark uses 32 million numbers, calculating the square root via 'a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions'. We're not sure what that means either, but you can read the full blurb on WPrime's About page. What we do know is that WPrime scales well across multiple CPU cores, and can push a CPU to 100 per cent load on all its cores.

To run the benchmark, first visit the core count to check that WPrime will load all physical and logical cores, and then run the 32M test. The results are expressed as a time taken to calculate the square root of the set of numbers (32 million in the standard test). A lower score is better.