Super7 Upgrade Guide: The K6-2+ and K6-3+ Processors

Gaming Performance - UnrealTournament

Just as we saw in MDK2, Unreal Tournament could not really care less how much on-die L2 cache a processor has, as long as it has some. The performance jump with the addition of on-die L2 cache was 8%. After that, all that matters is clock speed.

The 100MHz clock speed increase was able to add 6% to performance, but that is it. Even the fastest chip tested, the K6-3+ 550MHz, only scored 18.8 FPS in our Unreal Tournament tests, performance that is lackluster as is. The bottleneck seems to be the CPU and system as a whole, since there is no question that the GeForce2 GTS is capable of performing faster.

Scores across the board decreased as we moved to 1024x768x32, leaving all the chips with any L2 cache performing nearly identically. We can eliminate the video card as the potential bottleneck, as the GeForce2 GTS is clearly capable of doing better.

The most likely culprit holding the K6+ series processors back is the aging K6-X series architecture. It is hard to point to a specific aspect of the K6's design, but the problem could be a result of the chip's decoder which is known to be poor. Designed quite a few years ago, it seems that the architecture may be showing its age.