Media Encoding and Gaming Performance Commentary
Gamers have always been an important and loyal market for AMD, but recently, Athlon has lost quite a bit of ground to Intel in this area. The gaming benchmarks were a very pleasant surprise on our Athlon64 level Opteron. The 2.0GHz Opteron on an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card significantly out-performed the same setup with Pentium 4. As you can see in our benchmarks, the older Quake 3 is about 10% faster on the 2.0GHz Opteron than it is on the fastest P4 that we have tested.Even more surprising is the performance of the A64 level Opteron on Gun Metal 2. This DX9 benchmark is an up-to-date gaming benchmark that shows the Opteron out-performing P4 and Athlon 3200+ by a whopping 42% to 54%. As we continue through Unreal Tournament 2003, our Opteron running at A64 speed is the clear gaming champion at 12% to 19% faster than number 2. We also are experimenting with the new X2 Benchmark as an addition to our gaming suite. X2 is heavy on Transform and Lighting effects, and therefore, adds another dimension to game benchmarks. The 2.0 Opteron was also the best performer in X2, but not by the margins we see in other game benchmarks.
This gaming performance is very good news for AMD, as Athlon64 appears capable of mopping the floor with the competition when it comes to gaming. The on-chip memory controller has had the promise of making this kind of difference in gaming performance. In as much as our Opteron at 2.0Ghz is representative of Athlon64 gaming performance, the Athlon64 will be a must-have for dedicated gamers. Keep in mind that this is a comparison of 32-bit gaming performance. As effective as the Athlon64/Opteron appear to be in this area, we can’t wait to see 64-bit gaming results.
XMpeg conversion benchmarks show nForce3/Opteron significantly faster than the 3200+ Barton, with a performance improvement of about 20%. This is still not enough to bring it to the best Pentium 4 performance levels, but it does make the 2.0 Opteron competitive with the best encoding performance.
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Anonymous User - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
Not to worry, there will soon be more competition for Opteron in the form of Low Voltage (and price) Itaniums, Prescotts, and even 800 MHz FSB Nocona XEONs. It's going to be very fun in the next year or so.Anonymous User - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
Am I the only one concerned that each test platform seems to use different amounts of system memory?Anonymous User - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
1 OF 2 things will have to happen. Either MS reduces their prices to compete with Linux or Linux will start charging/more for their OS. Open source is great and cheap right now which is why it is popular, but someone will try to commercialize it.Anonymous User - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
Fortunately in the next few years many folks will be switching to Linux both 32 and 64-bit just to get away from Windoze and all the stability and security issues with virtually every version of Windoze, bar none. This will be good news for AMD and the Opteron/A64 which both run very well on Linux and 64-bit Linux is available to all right now.Once the software companies wake up and smell the coffee and pull their heads out of Microsofts's butthole, they'll start releasing apps for Linux that look and feel like those for Windoze. This will facilitate a relatively painless transition for millions of folks who would switch to Linux immediately if they could import all of their existing apps files without headaches. Thankfully with enterprise and World governments switching to Linux, there is a clear financial incentive for software makers to get their act together and fill customer needs. The World will be a much better place when consumers have the ability to purchase a quality O/S and software apps and at this stage of the game Linux is a clear winner over any Windoze O/S for stability, performance and security.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Well when the P4 first came out it was slower than the P3, and costed around $1200-1500. You expect a new series processor to be dirt cheap? Yeah right.Prescott is what, a P4 with 20w more heat dissapation and 1MB cache and several (currently) useless instructions? OK, it has some other secret features. How long though can the 2x ALU stay 2x? They will run at 6.8ghz, and getting them to work at higher speeds will be 2x as hard as the rest of the processor (and it's now supposively going to be 4x?).
Of course, I guess everyone forgot, this is just a preview, not the acutal thing, so why get so worked up over it?.
Whether the desktop version is great or not, the more Opterons you run together only get better, with the Xeon you get less in return from going 2 to 4.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
What is the reason that overclocked Opteron 244 is used instead of the real Opteron 246 that is available in retail? What is the reason to use 2 Gig of memory and compare it to a system that uses 512 MB memory? If memory doesn't matter in those bechmarks then why 2x256 isn't used?Why not to compare to Pentium 3.2 which is the top Intel desktop chip instead of 3.0 GHz?
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Why on earth are the benchmark results in FLASH?Thats just really annoying.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
This benchmark is pretty funny, it leaves a lot to be desired from todays reviewers. Not that I think the athlon64 isn't a very good improvement, but the results they are showing do not match any other results people have seen, reminds me of the Hardocp reviews.Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Just for your information number 49, the 2.0GHz CPU anandtech tested won't be the fastest CPU AMD releases on the 23rd, so comparing it to a 3.2GHz CPU would actually have been unfair.Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
That's not anand hahahah :p