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The much maligned and
misunderstood 3DMark 2003, is fortunately for us here,
mostly without controversy. Since we're using only one
graphics card in this test, the Radeon 9700 Pro, there
should be less muck to cloud the picture. The only concern
you could remotely point to here, is whether or not the
test's Athlon or Pentium 4 compilations favor one host CPU
over another. However, this can be argued for nearly
every test you could throw at a processor, either real
application or synthetic. As the old saying goings,
let's "get over it" and just run the numbers.
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3DMark 2003 Standard and CPU Test |
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No controversy
here - One graphics card fits all |
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The 3.2GHz P4
only takes the lead by 5% versus the Athlon XP 3200+ here.
The graphics pipeline is the limiting factor and as you can
see, at 1024X768, the performance gain from 3GHz to 3.2GHz
in the Pentium 4 is negligible. However, the CPU test
portion of a standard 3DMark 03 run, will drop the quality
settings down, taking the burden off the graphics subsystem.
Things scale
more in line with what is expected here with nearly an 8%
advantage for the 3.2G P4. Additionally, the 3.06GHz
P4's 60MHz clock speed advantage actually gives it a small
edge over the 3GHz P4 with 800MHz FSB.
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Novalogic's Comanche 4 |
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Frame rates on the
battle field |
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Flight Sim fans
in our midst will attest to the fact that one of the best
things you can do to improve performance in rendering all
that terrain data, is to drop in a faster processor.
Novalogic's Comanche 4 is no exception and the test is very
CPU and bandwidth intensive. The 3.2GHz P4 has a 21%
lead over the Athlon XP 3200+ and approximately a 7% lead
over its 3GHz siblings. This again all scales
appropriately, since a 200MHz speed advantage versus a 3GHz
P4, translates to roughly a 6.6% clock speed boost.
Quake 3 Four Demo, SPEC ViewPerf And The Wrap-up
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