Comparison of Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 Processor Performance White Paper

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Figure 3: Comparison of Pentium III and Pentium 4 in 3D Winbench 2000 Processor Test

To display 3D objects on a 2D computer screen, it is much easier to represent 3D objects as a collection of polygons (usually triangles) than as curved surfaces. The larger the number of triangles used to represent the 3D object, the more closely the approximation of the mathematical description resembles the 3D object. The process of breaking up a 3D object into triangles is called tessellation and involves an enormous number of floating-point vector calculations. Objects in the real world have material properties and reflectivity and these impact how the objects interact with light, the more lighting from various sources and angles, the more realism to the object/scene. Again, calculations of light effects on 3D objects require large numbers of complex floating-point vector calculations. The CPU index performance gain in the 3D Winbench 2000 – Processor Test, benchmark, illustrated in Figure 3, resulted from the increase in floating-point performance of the Pentium 4 processor.