Cinebench rendering
Graphics is a classic example of a computing problem that's easily parallelizable, so it's no surprise that we can exploit a multi-core processor with a 3D rendering app. Cinebench is the first of those we'll try, a benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D rendering engine. It's multithreaded and comes with a 64-bit executable. This test runs with just a single thread and then with as many threads as CPU cores are available.

Rendering is generally computationally bound, not limited by memory bandwidth or the like. In this case, then, the QX9650 is achieving its clock-for-clock performance boost thanks to its fast radix-16 divider or its single-cycle 128-bit SSE shuffle ability.

POV-Ray rendering
We caved in and moved to the beta version of POV-Ray 3.7 that includes native multithreading. The latest beta 64-bit executable is still quite a bit slower than the 3.6 release, but it should give us a decent look at comparative performance, regardless.

3ds max modeling and rendering

The computational performance enhancements in the QX9650 bring benefits in all three of our rendering test apps. In the case of the POV-Ray chess2 scene, the QX9650 shaves 17 seconds off of the QX6850's render time, vaulting it ahead of the Athlon 64 FX-74.