Displacement & Depth of Field render.

This time I decided to forgo the ViewSpecPerf tests, since they are mostly dependent on the installed video card, and this system contained the same video card as the dual-core xw8400. However, I did test Maya, including Pixar's RenderMan Artist Tools plug-in renderer and NVIDIA's Gelato renderer. Both renderers performed well and were very responsive. For more on Gelato, see my dual-core xw8400 article on VFXWorld.

Gaming
If you're anything like me, you do other things on your system besides work, including email, web surfing and gaming. Granted, a quad-core processor is wasted on most games, but if you've ever had a chance to run a first-person shooter or MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) on a high-end 3D workstation, you know that it's enough to make even the most jaded gamer drool. I'm a little late to the game, but I recently started playing World of Warcraft (WoW). MMORPGs have come a long way since I first became immersed in the genre with Asheron's Call. I was amazed at the appearance and performance of WoW on this system. The graphics were simply breathtaking, and I was able to play at native resolution, with 4x sampling and almost every video setting turned to high. However, I found that I had less video tearing when I turned on Vertical Sync.

Light Gallery render.

I've got some comparison screen captures from the xw8400 and my Mac Pro with a GeForce 7300 GT. One thing I noticed on the xw8400 was the fact that my character wasn't wearing any pants! He just has a bearskin loincloth on, which looked like pants on the Mac, but, on the HP, I was a little embarrassed in hindsight. I also had to disable many of the special effects on the Mac, set my video resolution to 1344x840 and multisample to 1x. The differences are best described by the screen captures below:

The Best of Both Worlds, Eight Times Over
Ever wanted to have your cake and eat it too? A quad-core system might just make your wish come true. Whether you're rendering in the background, manipulating complex datasets or playing games and surfing the net, there's often power to spare. Or you can run processor intensive calculations and final gathers with mental ray, and max out all eight cores, as the first image depicts. The HP xw8400 quad-core is the fastest system I've ever worked with, and handled most of the work I threw at it with nary a stutter and processor cycles left over. The times it did stall would have locked up a lesser computer for much longer, if it could have recovered at all. The system's front side bus runs at 1333 MHz and it's SLI ready. The display is huge, bright and crisp, and can handle fast video quite well. The only thing that's missing from this equation is you.

Bryan Hoff is a multifaceted artist and writer. A web designer, digital artist and animator, his credits include television effects, online games, 3D corporate animation, Flash and traditional web site design. His writing credits include articles for LinuxWorld, Element K Journals, InformIT and VFXWorld, covering topics like Photoshop effects, Linux 3D graphics applications, Web and HTML design, RSS feeds and painting with a graphics tablet. Bryan has written ebooks on blogging and web site creation for beginners and is co-author of the book Moving from Windows to Linux.