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By,
Dave Altavilla
March 22, 2004
In the immortal
words of our good friend Terry Tate - Office Linebacker,
"when it's game time, it's pain time baby!"
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Wolfenstein Enemy Territory |
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OpenGL Quake Engine Gaming |
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Wolfenstein
Enemy Territory is a highly modified Quake 3 engine based
game, with next generation lighting techniques, higher
polygon counts and larger more detailed textures. We
turned the resolution way down, in an effort to offload the
graphics subsystem and let the processors we tested run as
fast as they could pushing the polygons.
Quake 3 engine
based games are memory bandwidth hounds for certain and the
3.4GHz P4EE puts up the best number for Intel.
Prescott's deeper pipeline holds it back a bit but its
larger L2 cache allows it to make up some ground, albeit not
enough to catch its Northwood sibling. The Athlon
3400+ holds true to its branding, coming up right along side
the 3.4GHz Northwood and the Athlon 64 FX chips take the #1
and #2 spots overall.
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3DMark 2003 |
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DirectX 8 Gaming Performance |
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Taking a quick
step back into synthetic benchmarking with FutureMark's
3DMark03, we ran the CPU test module of the benchmark
exclusively to isolate CPU performance and place less
emphasis on the graphics subsystem.
Prescott shows
an advantage over the P4 Northwood cores and it's obvious
this test is memory bandwidth and latency sensitive, as
again the P4EE posts the best number for the Pentium 4 team.
Once again however, the Athlon 64s make a strong showing
with the 3400+ dropping in between both the 3.4GHz Northwood
and Prescott P4 scores. For the enthusiast class
processors here, the numbers are fairly nip and tuck with
the FX-51 falling short of the 3.4GHz P4EE and the FX-53
taking the over all lead by a very small margin of less than
2%.
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Comanche 4 |
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DirectX 8 Gaming - CPU Limited |
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In our Comanche
4 low resolution benchmark test, it seems like Intel's
Prescott P4s packed it up and called it a day early, falling
well behind every CPU we tested, regardless of clock speed.
However, we had a photo finish for the 3.4GHz Northwood and
the Athlon 64 FX-51. Just so you are aware, this is
not a typo in our graph. On one hand, the test seems
to favor the Northwood based P4s here with the tricked out
Extreme Edition (which is really called a Gallatin core CPU)
taking the win. On the other hand, this is one
benchmark we're sure Intel wouldn't have minded if were left
out of the mix altogether, since Prescott seems to really
choke on it.
Unreal Tournament 2003, X2 The Threat and The Wrap-up
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