Real World -
LightWave 3D 9.6 x64 -
Our first real world test is LightWave 3D. This is an industry standard 3D Animation and rendering software from Newtek.  Our rendering tests with LightWave 9.6 have changed. I have always been a fan of the Classic Camera and the multi-pass PLD anti-aliasing that it offered. However, what I did not know was that this type of camera model was only capable of about 75-80% CPU utilization.  This makes it very inefficient [as I am sure you guessed] so we made the shift to the newer perspective camera and are using its much better [100% CPU utilization] threaded engine as well as a newer and more efficient form of anti-aliasing. Along with this new camera model we get ray tracing and some other nice features. We have also leapt from the 1080p resolutions we used before and are now setup with a 35mm 4k resolution of 4096 x 3072; this should give the CPU a nice workout. To show off the vast difference in performance between the two we ran both and show you the render times here. This also shows what you can do when your application is truly written for a multi-threaded CPU.

Impressive is the word for the 3960X’s performance in Lightwave 3D. Running at its stock speed of 3.3GHz is it able to beat the competition by a minimum of 30 Seconds for our 4k render! That 30 seconds turns into almost nine minutes in our 30 second project estimate. If you compare apples to apples here then you can save as much as 30 minutes off of a 4k 30 second project render simply by going with the 3960X and a quad channel memory kit. I have not seen a performance improvement (one generation over the next) like this since Intel launched the original Conroe CPUs. There have been improvements but nothing quite like this.


AutoGK 2.55 -
AutoGK is a compilation of transcoding applications wrapped up into a very nice installer and front end application. It is a great ‘one-stop’ for transcoding or even re-encoding files. For our testing we transcode a 2-hour movie at 100% quality and record the time it takes to complete.

I wish I had great performance news about AutoGK and the 3960X, but I do not. Something about the new CPU causes the transcoder to crash after launching VirtualDub. We are certain this is a software issue, but unfortunately we do not have a fix for it yet. We are looking into another transcoding application that is non-brand specific and that will work with all configurations. We will also try and get in touch with the developers from VirtualDub and also the guys that package AutoGK. If we have any updates we will let you know.