Brothers, president and senior art director of Mere Productions in Austin, Texas, designs and creates virtual environments and film sets for the digital entertainment industry, as well as for e-commerce and visual applications. As his company carves out a new niche in a still infant industry, Brothers wants all that technology can offer. The AMD Athlon processor delivers, according to him.

"In my work, I need all the speed I can get," he said. "It's a system I will use in my business."

The biggest hurdle Brothers encounters while designing his virtual environments is the prolonged time it takes his computer to render an image.

"Rendering is the consistent bottleneck in our workflow," he said.

Adding the crucial realism of ray traced reflections, shadows and reflected light to a digital environment only adds to the output time.

"These features, though extremely realistic, are also extremely processor-intensive, which often translates into prohibitive rendering times," Brothers said. "Any processor that can decrease the rendering time, and do so affordably, is incredibly beneficial to us because it helps us deliver increasingly beautiful work to our clients more quickly and more profitably. The AMD Athlon processor gives us that speed and affordability."

Recently, Brothers put his single AMD Athlon platform processor with 128M RAM up against a dual Pentium® II processor-based system platform with 512M RAM. He rendered the same scene on both computers, but the final acts were decidedly different. The AMD Athlon clearly outperformed the PII. Pentium II processor-based system.

"Put simply, the AMD Athlon blew away my dual Pentium II. I was pleasantly surprised, to say the least. I'm consistently a 30 to 50 percent speed increase (with Athlon)," Brothers said.

The time savings saved adds up, especially considering an artist must perform numerous test renders daily while building an environment, Brothers said. The test renders allow the artist to check their work as they refine lighting and materials, ensuring that the virtual model looks the way it should for the final rendition.

When an artist performs even 30 test renders in a day, each taking up to 5 minutes, more than a quarter of the workday can be spent waiting on the computer. The AMD Athlon slashes that time nearly in half, "drastically increasing the overall productivity of each artist," said Brothers.

After testing out the AMD Athlon processor, Mere Productions quickly put it to work on one of its signature projects. Brothers created a groundbreaking 3D model and virtual tour of the new Austin-Bergstom International Airport in Austin, Texas. The Internet-based virtual tour allows visitors to navigate throughout the fully interactive terminal. With the click of a mouse, they can purchase tickets at an airline's ticket counter or reserve a rental car from a company of their choice, just as they would in the actual terminal. Mere Productions plans to use his AMD Athlon processor-based system as the company continues to improve and add onto the tour.

Brothers' work in digital architecture benefits in other ways from the AMD Athlon processor's seventh-generation x86 microarchitecture. The AMD Athlon boosts the performance of many graphics-intensive software applications, not only in rendering time, but also in the real-time graphical display of the interface. This means that the necessity for lengthy test renders is even further reduced with the AMD Athlon processor because the artist can see much of the final product in real time.

As Brothers explains, with increased graphical display capabilities at the interface level, he can get immediate visual feedback on the look of materials and lighting as he is designing.

With the AMD Athlon processor, "I have the ability to display much more information while I'm working. That's what you really hope for, to see as much of the final product as you can without hitting the rendering button," Brothers said.