Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8

Website: Sony Creative Software

Sony Vegas Movie Studio is an industry leading movie making application that offers support for a large variety of video formats. It can handle the latest multi-channel audio and high-definition content, even including AVCHD and HDV.

Further features include mixing and editing, video composite creating and video restoration among others.

Here we use the free version: Platinum 8, to transcode a 1080p High-Definition 5.1 Channel AC3 audio DivX file into a 720p WMV9HD in CBR Compression at 25 fps with the audio converted into 192Kbps, 48KHz, 16-bit Stereo WMA9. Overall, the bitrate equates to around 5Mbps.





Yet again the Intel Q6600 sits closer to the Phenom X4 9850 than 9750: two seconds versus ten. The B3s again have the slight edge over the B2s but it's not by much – the improved clock speeds help more than a clock for clock update where the 9550 is only five seconds faster than the 9500 at 2.3GHz.

Blender

Website: Blender.org

Blender is a free, open source software 32-bit 3D modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, and gaming program. Initially developed by Ton Roosendaal's company NaN in the Netherlands, its popularity, and capabilities, have grown over the years. There is a large and active user base with ongoing development by dedicated hackers, making Blender a powerful and viable 3D software solution.

It can be used for modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and soft body dynamics, modifier based modelling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting.



Blender favours clock speed over core numbers, and the improved clock for clock performance and larger cache still keeps the Intel Q6600 ahead of even the Phenom 9850 by several seconds in both SMP and single thread tests. The B3s are quite considerably better performing than the B2s, but in this test even the older, higher clocked Athlon 64 X2s are still faster.