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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thatsright - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Great article, but just one quibble. Is it just me, or does it sound like AMD paid AnandTech for the last sentence of the article: "In the end, the winner of the final battle is clear: the AMD Athlon 64 is the processor for Doom 3"It sounds like a perfect quote from the AMD marketing dept! LOL
DAPUNISHER - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Good stuff! That was the most entertaining set of benchies I've seen in awhile. D3 is evidently turning out to be a better benching tool than game =)kherman - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Dear anandtech,Please do a similar benchmarking wtih system memmorry.
Sincerely,
me
ViRGE - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
#9, Carmack has stated that Doom 3 does not have SMP support.CrimsonDeath - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
How about pumped up XP-M's? I got one running at 2700Mhz, that would make it better than most cpu's out there.Overclock till it burns, then overclock more!
punko - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Guess my XP 1800+ ain't gonna cut it . . .kherman - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Well, my 2800+ is staying in my box!kherman - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
In the days of GPU shootouts, this article is an EXCELENT idea! Good work! Still have to read it though.It's funny to, because I'm contemplating a move to 1 gig of memmory.
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Just to clarify before the comments start, there are TWO 3400+ Athlon 64 as you will see in checking at New Egg for instance. The NEW 3400+ is Socket 754, runs at 2.4GHz and has 512k cache. The original 3400+ is still available and is Socket 754, runs at 2.2GHz, and has 1MB cache.Wesley Fink - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Please keep in mind that the small Athlon 64 increases in Dual-Channel and Cache-size are cumulative. While it's true that Dual-Channel only adds about 3% to A64 performance and 1MB cache only adds about 5%, the combination adds 8 to 10% improved performance. The FX53 is the ONLY chip that combines BOTH 1MB cache and Dual-Channel memory and is 8 to 10% faster than a comparable chip using Single-Channel (Socket 754) and 512MB cache.The Dual-Channel 1MB FX53 should be about 8% to 10% faster than the latest Newcastle SC 512K 3400+ even though both run run at 2.4Ghz. Another interesting point is that since Cache mattered more in Doom3 than Dual-Channel, a 3700+ (SC, 1MB cache) might actually be faster in Doom3 than a 3800+ (DC, 512MB). This was certainly true in Anand's tests of the 3400+ (SC, 1MB0, which was faster than the 3500+ (DC, 512MB).
Whether the top-performing FX53 is worth the $811 price is up to you, but it is still a bargain in Doom3 compared to the 3.4EE that is 18% slower and still sells for $1000.