Battle 1: Prescott vs. Northwood
The first battle of our Doom 3 CPU Comparison occurs between the two Pentium 4 cores: Prescott and Northwood.
You may remember from our review of Prescott that the new 90nm core was hard pressed to outperform its 130nm Northwood predecessor. Although Prescott featured twice the cache of Northwood, its longer pipeline and similar clock speeds held it back in most performance tests. However, Prescott does have one major advantage over Northwood - twice the L1-D and L2 cache. In other games the added cache has not been able to do much for Prescott, but let's see how that changes under Doom 3:
How the tables have turned - Prescott is actually faster than Northwood for a change, and at the same clock speed. A 7% performance advantage over the regular Pentium 4 3.2C is not too shabby for Prescott, but how can we be sure that the performance advantage is solely due to the cache size advantage? Look at the Extreme Edition.
The 3.2GHz Extreme Edition shares the same core as Northwood, but features a 2MB on-die L3 cache, and manages to outperform Northwood and Prescott by 15% and 7% respectively. These first benchmarks foreshadow what is soon to come and bring about a realization that Doom 3 is quite possibly the most memory/cache dependent game we've ever benchmarked.
The standings remain the same at higher resolutions, but as we've see the 6800 Ultra becomes mostly GPU limited at 1280x1024, reducing the impact of these processors. The Extreme Edition still manages to be 10% faster than Northwood, and Prescott continues to hold a lead over Northwood, just not as much at the higher resolution.
The last thing we wanted to look at in the Northwood vs. Prescott battle was how the two CPUs scaled - as we mentioned in our original Prescott review, we expected Prescott to do a better job scaling with clock speed than Northwood and we are beginning to see examples of that here in Doom 3:
Although it's ever-so-slight, Prescott's performance does seem to scale with clock speed better than Northwood.
The winner of this battle is clearly Prescott, we're sure Intel's happy that there's finally a situation where Northwood isn't in the limelight.
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michael2k - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Heh, what about frames/$ graphs?Da3dalus - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Lovely graphs, *pats my Athlon 64 3200+ while waiting for Doom 3*Another week for Doom 3 to hit our european shelves, damnit I hate waiting for something you americans already have :-/
elfy6x - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
I have a dual Opteron 246 setup, with 1Gb of ram, and a Radeon 9700 Pro. I'm not really a gamer, but I gave Doom 3 a shot, and it utilizes both of my CPU's when I play. I have nothing else running when I play the game. It doesn't tax both CPU's to 100% but one CPU fluctuates between 40-50% while the other one bounces around 10-20%. So something is processing two threads. Just my observation. :)PotatoMAN - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
I second the idea of benching memory and video memory at AT for doom week. I have a 3200+ A64 and I am wondering if I am starving it more with a 9800 pro (128) or with my 512mb of RAM. Thanks AT for being awesome!Gooberslot - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
I bet a 1-1.2ghz P3 or Athlon would cut it for a minimum. Just go back and look at the old benchmarks of the P4 1.5ghz on here. Only in Quake3 was the P4 on top. In UT the P4 actually tied with the P3 1ghz. Pathetic. Stating minimum requirements based on those old Williamete P4's is very misleading. Perhaps the real minimum cpu requirements should have been 1.2ghz P3 or Athlon, 1.5ghz P4, or 2.4ghz Celeron. :)matman326 - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Man I always knew that an athlon 64 system was powerfull but a 180 dollar proc. beating Intels Extremly Expensive 1000 dollar proc is just mind blowing. So much for the Netburst design kicking butt.AtaStrumf - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
If you could find some time, I'd like to see a comparison between 128 and 256 MB R9800Pro, and 512 RAM and 1024 MB RAM. Basicly how much of a difference do video and system RAM make.at80eighty - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
dammit! looks like im gonna celebrate Christmas with a loan..grrrr... : )WooDaddy - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Two words:AMD ROX!!!
I've been an AMD user since the 386 days and even had a NexGen processor (pre-pentium, K5). Never went Intel, never will (maybe)...
Thatsright,
Naw.. The charts don't lie. But to be fair, let's wait for the Intel-funded people (aka Tom's (blow)hardware) to put up their benchmarks. 10 bucks says they'll make all kinds of excuses to why Intel procs aren't fast enough.
Regs - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Wow. Good info. Dual channel offers nothing. And the socket 939 2.2 Ghz CPU offers nothing over my 3000 A64 which costs 200 dollars less. Given that if you play on higher resolutions.