I'll try to make my reply short time time :-) "I don't see anything on there that indicates hand optimization - nor do I find any references on the 'net to hand optimization being necessary for P4 optimization. I would be happy to look over any references you might have to that being a requirement for significant gains." The webpage you refered to has the proof: "In addition to being recompiled with the Intel compiler, the following DLLs have had key performance functions optimized using SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). Pentium III class processors and higher will be able to take advantage of these optimizations. Rend.dlr Blur.dlv" I think you'll agree that the rend.dlr would be the most likely candidate if you want to modify a DLL to improve performance. I wouldn't even be suprised if you could gain up to 30% from just those 2 DLLs, and not even touch the rest. "Intel just plain has some talented people. That is why I am always amazed when folks assume those same talented folks are being purely driven by their marketing department into making silly choices :)" I never said it was a silly choice. It has been a very smart move by Intel and AMD still has a lot of problems trying to inform people that Mhz alone doesn't say anything about performance. It would have been a silly choice if the impact of that design decision had been so large that they would not have been able to keep up with AMD. Right now the situation is that both have equally powerfull CPUs. But also remember that those talented folks still want to be paid. And that sometimes means that you have to accept what management decides and try to make the best of it. Lastly I'll counter your story about .NET with past experience with DirectX. DirectX got optimized for ISSE and later for 3DNow! Did we ever notice anything? Did you ever notice that the ATI and Nvidia drivers got optimized for them? No! Those generic optimizations will hardly ever really give big performance gains. You need to make optimizations specifically for your application to really get performance gains. That is what is proven time and again. Take a look at Quake. Only when game developers get help from Intel (or AMD) are really big performance gains realized. Without help from Intel they can't accomplish it. The same here with the special performance pack for Max. BTW most performance gains I have seen for CPUs have been geared towards the use of SSE and SSE2 (or 3Dnow!) With the mpeg in windows media player being the best example. P4 did very well in those benchmarks, and people thought that was because of the P4 architecture. Later it was discovered that media player didn't activate the SSE optimizations in the AthlonXP CPU. The moment those were activated the Athlon got just as much performance gain as the P4 and the Athlon beat the P4 again in that department. That's why I am also interested in the performance gain with that pack when used with the P3 and the AthlonXP. Since the most important modifications seem to be geared towards SSE and not just P4. Hmm, it seems I didn't manage to make a short reply after all.... ;-) One last remark. I don't agree with you that there is such a wide disparity in performance across machines of similar CPU. Most systems perform as expected and are grouped in clusters. I see only a few exceptions: - XP 1800+ 68 seconds. As I said before I really wonder what is holding that system back. - Dual 1700+ Not really an exception since a dual config gives overhead, and AGP implementation on dual systems is not that good. - the 1Ghz Athlon systems seem out of place. Maybe they are SlotA athlons instead of Thunderbirds? But differences in having that dancing man activated or not should also be considered. BTW I would also love to see Poser4 compiled with the Intel compiler. But I would like to see two compilations. One with P4 optimizations turned on, and one with normal settings but also with the Intel compiler. Just to see the difference between the Intel compiler and another compiler, and the difference between different settings within the compiler. I remember IBM made the Windows3.1 within OS/2 10% faster by just taking the source code from Microsoft and compiling it with their own compiler. They didn't modify any file for that and it didn't use any CPU specific settings either.