Only way to answer this question is to intensely test all the systems.
Greg Hess did make a great effort in that direction:
Problem is that it is simply imposible to keep it updated, since both software and hardware change everyday.
My personal limited experince:
I’ve been working for the last year and a half on a Dual AMD MP 2000+ 2 Gb RAM Win 2K SP3.
Friday Got a new toy: Dual Intel Xeon 2,8 Ghz 2Gb RAM Win XP
No time for indeep testing so far, but first impressions:
Rendering several VRay scenes averages as follow:
What Dual AMD 2000+ (1,67 ghz) takes 100 to render
The Dual Xeon 2,8 Ghz take 65.
So it is faster somewhat as expected.
What has surprised me is the much, much, much better performance on the viewports!, no objective testing that I’ve done, only subjective impression, but may I say that I am impressed with the Xeon perofrmance in the viewports?
Graphic cards are not spectacular in any case:
Dual AMD with Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4800 SE
Dual Xeon with Nvidia GeForce FX 5600
As for the Opterons… I’ll wait till we live in a 64 bit world, now our worl is only 32. :roll: May be they are my next upgrade… who knows.