Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part II: A Deeper Look
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 6, 2005 12:23 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Multitasking Scenario 2: DVD Shrink
For our next test, we wanted to do something a little less strenuous, so we only ran one background task: DVD Shrink. We left DVD Shrink at its default low priority and went ahead with our benchmarks:
Thanks to DVD Shrink behaving and running with a low priority, our gameplay was largely unaffected on the Athlon 64. The performance dropped less than 3% in Doom 3.
What's very interesting, however, is that the Pentium 4 630 takes a huge performance hit with DVD Shrink running in the background. Despite being set to a low priority, since Hyper Threading allows both the DVD Shrink thread and Doom 3 thread to execute concurrently, they both contend for the same microprocessor execution resources. This happens to be one case where Hyper Threading is actually very bad for performance, as the OS has no idea that its scheduling is actually hurting the CPU's performance severely.
The performance gap between the Pentium D and the Athlon 64 actually closes quite a bit under Splinter Cell. The minimum frame rates are now identical, although the maximum frame rates are clearly higher on the AMD system.
Once again, HT has a negative impact in this case on the Pentium 4 630.
Just for kicks, we decided to turn off DVD Shrink's low priority setting to see what impact that would have on performance. The low priority mode of DVD Shrink basically makes it transparent to gaming. Unchecking this option definitely changes things, it wouldn't even start on the Athlon 64 system.
It eventually ran on the Pentium D system after waiting several minutes for it to start, and even then, performance wasn't acceptable. It just goes to show you that dual core isn't Superman; it does have its limits.
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segagenesis - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#30 - Excuse me for trying to save money also. Last I checked Intel was still more expensive. Not to mention Extremely Expensive edition.rqle - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
All i know is that i alt-tab / alt-enter to the desktop running general apps all the time while gaming. I bought two system so i can download while gaming on the other system for this very reason. To do both at the same time would cause the ftp software to go into idle state with the fastest download speed at only 8-10kb/s. I can set the ftp software at a higher priority but then it would just cripple my gaming. These dual core look very promising, but ill hold out for amd dual core.GentleStream - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
I'm interested in benchmarks that would be relevant to scientific computing and software development.How about benchmarking a parallel compile of some non-trivial software package such as building the
gcc compiler. That takes quite a long time on my 4 year old laptop.
danidentity - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
So when are the Pentium D and the new chipsets being released?Spill it Anand. ;)
Turnip - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#23What about the fourth option? That by the time AMD's desktop dual core processor is available, Intel will have a new dual core processor available. Now, whether we're talking more than "two cores bunged on a chip", or whether we're simply talking a jacked up FSB (which has, remember, always given Intel a hefty jump in the encoding arena), I don't know. But I do know one thing...
Intel is a very big company and Intel has very big sleeves. ;)
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
SpearhawkGood catch, the graphing engine didn't regenerate those graphs properly. Fixed now.
Take care,
Anand
Questar - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
I love this, all the AMD fanboys having seizures over that fact that an Intel CPU can actually have some benefits.It's been a blast reading all these posts the last two days.
Spearhawk - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
He said that a 2.2 GHz dualcore Athlon 64 wouldn't compete with the 2.8 GHz Pentium D at encoding. Notice the encoding part, he said nothing about other stuff.I'm guessing one can know that by looking at dual CPU Opteron systems, the dualcore A64 won't beat them, and if they can't beat a 2.8 Pentium D then the dualcore A64 won't be able to either.
Is there something wrong with the graphs in the DVD Shrink/Game test? The comments doesn't seem to match them (especialy the part about the minimum frame rate being equal)
PorBleemo - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
How do you calculate the system wattages like that? I have been attempting to find detailed information on how to do this but have turned up nothing yet.Thanks!
Illissius - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#10 - you are quite correct. anyone who games with a processor-intensive background task running at the same time _on a single core processor_ is insane. the reason I wanted to see benchmarks is to see whether dual core changes that.theoretically, I don't see why it wouldn't work:
- you only have one GPU, and only the game is using it
- you have two processor intensive tasks - the game and the background task, and two cores, one for each
hence, no conflict. whether that actually holds up in the real world is/was the question (if the background task is multithreaded, or heavily uses reasources other than just the processor, then naturally the above doesn't hold true).