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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
79 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
I thought that the Athlon64 did not have the integrated memory controller. That's the big difference between the Opteron and the Atlon64, in single processor quantities.Wesley Fink - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
The latest runors at the Inquirer and Xbit Labs have the Athlon64 FX launching at 2.2GHz, which seems to be the rumor consensus :-) I have an Asus SK8N board I am testing now with an Opteron, and it supports both ECC and non-ECC memory - but it appears it MUST be fed Registered memory. This means regular unbuffered memory will not likely work on the Opteron based CPU's.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Interesting. And isnt the Athlon64 FX supposed to be running at 2.3 ghz? Add in support for Non ECC memory (which is slower) and color me interested.And here I was all set on buying a new 3.0ghz P4 system in a couple of weeks... <sigh>
WheelsCSM - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Looks pretty good, how much are these things supposed to cost?sandorski - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Sounds good! Hopefully the Athlon 64 *will* perform in a similar manner.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Oh, nevermind. Disregard #3. I understand what you're saying now.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
"Our reference board includes full support for Dual-Channel DDR ECC memory, and the Athlon64 version will also support non-ECC memory"When it says "Athlon64" here is it referring to Athlon64 FX (Socket 940)? I thought that Athlon64 FX is basically an Opteron. And Opteron requires registered DIMMs with ECC.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Awesome preview Wes, i can't wait to get one of these bad boys to play with after the 23rd, hopefully in the prommie!!keep up the good work.
Tony
(bigtoe)
AgaBooga - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
I wonder when Intel will respond to these articles on Athlon 64 with some Prescott previews