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 - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Hey Wes, I've got some minor nitpicking to do. The graphs look great, but there's no unit labels on them. I know what the labels should be, but when you're presenting data you should always be sure to include labels for everything on the plot. Otherwise, you run into the possibility of misrepresenting data. Please make sure that all the graphs on future previews/reviews have their units labeled and perhaps even "bigger is better/shorter is faster"-like comments. Just addressing a pet peeve of mine. Aside from that, great article! Thanks.Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
This is not exactly related but for future motherboards/chipsets using this upcoming processor please use a RD2 PC Geiger (http://www.ioss.com.tw/web/English/RD2PCGeiger.htm... that you may provide us with information about the PCI bus frequency - important for overclocking.Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
#25. Ive tried both intel and AMD solutions for my personal machines at home. 10 times out of 10, AMd's have little quirks with them. the ride the bleeding edge.The company is losing money and cant continue to dump into R&D much longer, while INTEL's stock doubled in price in the last 4 months and is still rated a five star buy buy buy. Markets dont lie. The money is betting against AMD and in the fast moving techincal processor market where R&D is the most important aspect in the business model, AMD is losing. They just dont have the cash or assets to compete. The only thing they are good for is controlling The price Intel charges.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
hey #25 amd cant even get a cpu to the 3 ghz range. They had to create a virtual 3200+. the reason is an athalon runnig at 3 ghz is a FIRE HAZARD.Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
#24, that's funny! I didn't think that Intel fanboys still read AMD articles because in the end Intel is always better right?
So why waste your time reading the article if you already know what is best? Do you feel threatened that you won't have the best CPU anymore?
Go and cry to momy.
Personally, I found this article very educational because I had my mind set on buying an Intel 2.4C CPU and overclocking to 1000 FSB with DDR 500 but now I'll wait a couple more weeks to see how the Athlon64 turns out and how overclockable it is.
I'd also like to thank AnandTech for increasing the number of articles produced in the last week. If this continues then I'll become a regular visitor.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Face it. Intel makes the far superior Processor. That have the money to dump into R&D. This is a sign of the end for AMD. The farther they seperate themselves from the maintream, the more they lose.Who cares if they have some loyal geeks they worship them.
The real money is made by INTEL in the (Say it with me) BUSINESS market.
Their is a reason why dell wont touch an AMD
Its called UNRELIABLE
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
"Apparantly" socket 940 uses Registered dimms only, the boards do have overclocking options and DO overclock quite well.If you wait till QTR1 2004 you will be able to find socket 939 boards that do everything the 940 boards do, but can do this with Unbuffered Dimms also.
So if you want to upgrade but don't want to swap your standard PC3200 wait till early 2004 before you buy.
MS - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Wes,Which settings are you using in the GunMetal Benchmarks? I cannot replicate your results there and I am wondering whether I am doing something wrong ..
TIA
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
#20, 99% of gamers don't care about workstation benchmarks either :)Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
#19, no one runs Quake 3 in Linux. 99% of gamers use Windows, it would be a complete waste of time to do Linux Quake 3 benchmarks.