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By,
Marco Chiappetta
March 18, 2004
What do you say
we move onto something a little more fun, and run some tests
using a few popular games? To start our in-game
testing, we ran through a batch of time demos with the
OpenGL game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wolfenstein:
ET is a free, standalone multiplayer game that is based on
the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that was released
a few years back. It uses a heavily modified version of the
Quake 3 engine which makes it a very easy to use
benchmarking tool. We ran the test using the "Fastest"
setting at a low resolution of 640X480, using 16-bit color
and textures. Running this test with a high-end
graphics card, at these minimal settings, isolates processor
performance, without being limited by the graphics
subsystem.
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Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory |
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OpenGL Quake Engine Gaming |
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In the first of
our gaming related tests, the Athlon 64 FX-53 surpassed the 3.4GHz Extreme
Edition by 7.4 frames per second, or roughly 5.6%. 7.4
FPS may not be a huge margin of victory when we're seeing frame
rates well over 100 FPS, but it's still a victory
for the FX-53 nonetheless. When compared to the "standard" Pentium
4s, the FX's margin of victory is much larger, in the
neighborhood of 10% - 20% range.
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3DMark03 |
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DirectX Gaming Performance - Sort Of |
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It's not an
actual game, but 3DMark03's built-in CPU test give us
another "gaming related" DirectX metric to compare relative
performance. This test consists of two different 3D scenes
that are generated with a software renderer, which is
dependant on the host CPU's performance. This means that
the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator,
are instead sent to the central processor. The number of frames
generated per second in each test are used to determine the
final score.
The Athlon 64
FX-53 scored another victory in the 3DMark03 CPU benchmark,
albeit by a very small margin. With a score of 831 in
this test, the FX-53 was only about 1.5% "faster" than the
3.4GHz P4 EE. If we disregard the P4 EE, however, the
FX-53's performance becomes much more dominant in this test.
Without the extra 2MB of L3 cache, the equivalently clocked
3.4GHz P4C loses 102 points, which increases the FX-53's
lead to approximately 16%.
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Comanche 4 |
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DirectX 8 Gaming - CPU Limited |
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We continued our
testing with another DirectX benchmark, Novalogic's combat
helicopter simulation, Comanche 4. Although this is a game
benchmark that can be used to test the relative performance
of video cards, frame rates are strongly influenced by
processor speed and memory bandwidth, especially at low
resolutions with sound disabled, which is how we ran the
tests to get the frame rates listed below.
The scales tilted in favor of
the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition in the low-res Comanche
4 benchmark, but like the previous two game tests, the
performance delta separating the Intel and AMD flagship CPUs
was relatively small - in this case, 3.4 FPS or roughly
4.4%. The rest of the test systems performed
similarly, with the FX-51 and 3.4GHz P4C posting the exact
same scores, and the A64 3400+ outpacing the 3.2GHz P4C by
less than 1 FPS. Unfortunately for Intel, the new
3.2GHz "Prescott" got hammered (pun intended) in this test
with a frame rate that was about 15% lower than the next "slowest"
CPU in this test, the 3.2GHz P4C.
Unreal Tournament 2003, X2 The Threat and The Wrap-up
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