AMD QuadFX Platform & FX-70 Series Processors

Name: AMD QuadFX Platform & FX-70 Series Processors - Page 12
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, November 29, 2006, 10:00 PM EDT

For our next set of tests, we benchmarked all of the test systems using a custom single-player Quake 4 timedemo. Here, we installed the game's official v1.3 point release which is SMP capable, turned the resolution down to 640x480, and configured the game to run at its "Low-Quality" graphics setting. Although Quake 4 typically taxes today's high-end GPUs, when it's configured at these minimal settings, it is much more CPU and memory bandwidth-bound than anything else.

Benchmarks with Quake 4 v1.3

OpenGL Gaming Performance

Low-Resolution, Low-Quality testing with Quake 4 showed a marginal performance decrease on the QuadFX platform, likely due to the non-unified memory architecture and the increased latency that comes with it.

The same holds true on the High-Resolution, High-Quality tests. Here we raised the resolution to 1600x1200 and enabled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, and yet again the QuadFX platform failed to outpace its dual-core counterpart, the Athlon 64 FX-62, let alone any of the Core 2-based machines.

Tags: AMD, Processors, processor, CES, Platform, process, fx, pro, IE, SSO, PLA, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com