Cinebench 9.5 Rendering:

Cinebench is a free benchmarking tool based around Maxon's Cinema 4D 3D rendering software and the benchmark creator says that performance in the benchmark represents the kind of performance you can expect in Cinema 4D. We've used the CPU rendering benchmark for our testing purposes here and we've recorded the Cinebench Score.



In the single threaded version of the benchmark, the E6750 managed to squeeze out another couple of points and was the fastest overall. However, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ showed off its multi-threaded prowess and squeezed out a single point lead in the multi-threaded version of the test. The performance gap between the E6700 and E6750 increased by a couple of tenths of a percent as a result of moving to the multi-threaded version, but that's not going to make a massive difference when it comes to real rendering time.

Valve Particle Simulation:

Last November when we visited Valve Software's offices, the developer gave us a benchmark that shows off how the Source Engine can apply multi-threading to the problem of particle physics.

What is particle physics? Well, it's the interaction of micro-elements within the game - smoke, water, rain, fire. Valve's Tom Leonard told us that "with multi-core, you can have more complicated systems. You can have smoke that drifts off, bounces off the ceiling and then out the door."

"Better, you can have particle systems that actually have gameplay implications. Currently, particle systems are a representation of a game state - something is on fire - but they are fundamentally disconnected from the game world. But how about this - suppose you had a game where you were a wizard, and there was a field on fire. You could be genuinely concerned that the embers flying off the fire in the wind might hit the scroll in your hand - the scroll that has the spell on it to summon rain, the drops from which realistically douse the fire. These kind of experiences re-enforce the consistency of the world."

During our meeting with Valve, we were also told that the nice thing about particle systems is that they scale really well, and this makes them good for a benchmark. Chris Green, one of Valve's visual gurus, helped develop a benchmark to illustrate just that. The benchmark processes a number of particle examples and, depending on how quick it is able to do those, spits back out a number that is representative of performance.


While this doesn't represent true gaming performance, it does show how multi-threading can be implemented into future games. It not only scales well across multiple cores, but it also scales pretty well with higher front side bus speeds too. The Core 2 Duo E6750 was four percent faster than the E6700 and that's thanks to the bus speed increase.