Don't hold your breath waiting for code to be optimized for the P4. For most code it won't ever give any noticable performance gain, or is much too timeconsuming or too difficult to implement. Only in very rare cases will it give a real performance boost. It is the same story as with MMX, ISSE, ISSE2, 3Dnow! etc etc. MPEG encoding and some specific photoshop filters are indeed examples of those rare cases where you can indeed get huge performance boost. But just as with MMX and ISSE, those are only a very small part of current applications. There is no reason why suddenly the P4 optimalizations would work so much better then the P3, PPr0 or pentiumMMX optimalizations. (BTW photoshop is THE benchmarketing application. It is used to show how fantastic MMX was, how fantastic a Mac is/was, how fantastic an Athlon is or a P4. You can twist photoshop results any way you want it) I wonder how you have determined the P4 is so great for 3DsMax. In all tests I have seen the P4 performs nice in viewports, but final rendering performance is pretty sad. Also the good performance is the P4 in mpeg encoding is mainly because those programmers of Intel are much better then the programmers that made the inial code. Now that AMD programmers have helped with the codec also, the Athlon is once again (a little bit) faster than the P4. So there goes another myth about the P4. A few things to consider when reading Jim's results: Don't look at memory above 256MB. It is not used, so it doesn't influence the benchmark results. (different in more complex scenes of course. So memory is still important for Poser) CPU usage is not 100% during rendering. On my machine I only got 100% cpu usage during the first 6 seconds when the shadow map was created. Something else is the bottleneck here. I suspect it having to do with the temp file that is created, but I don't have definite proof of that. There might also be more issues like turning the dancing man off. It would be interesting to get to know more about the systems that somehow perform better or worse than similar systems. For example: the 24 seconds of the 2000+ systems is so much faster that it is not just caused by the CPU. 68 seconds for a 1800+ is so bad that something else must be holding it back. In general P4 systems seem to perform badly compared to Athlon and P3 systems. But that doesn't mean the CPU performs slow. Since the CPU usage isn't used 100% during rendering anyway other factors as RDRAM instead of DDR RAM, other IDE controllers, and such on the P4 systems have to be looked at also as a possible cause. And maybe Poser REALLY likes a powerful FPU. That will stay the weak spot of the P4.