Socket-A Chipset Comparison - April 2001

Expendable is another Direct3D title that maintains third-person overhead view with quite a few (and often excessive) explosions happening at all times.  During this timedemo that is built into the game's demo (run by executing go.exe with the -timedemo extension) there is rarely a point when things blowing up all around him don't surround the main character.  This fact of life, as far as Expendable is concerned, makes it another great performance tool for measuring chipset performance as there isn't too much going on that would point to the graphics card as a limit. 

Expendable also is a relatively old game, meaning that today's graphics accelerators are definitely overkill for running it (much like Forsaken was in the days that it was used as a benchmark), which is another reason that it is a great benchmark for our purposes. 

Again, the top two performers are the AMD 760 running at 133/133 DDR and the VIA KT133A also running at 133/133, respectively.  The performance difference here is less than 4%, indicating that the benchmark isn't as memory bandwidth intensive as UnrealTournament was at 640x480x16.  And from what we already know about what UT was able to show us, we should expect to see a larger focus on low latency configurations than high bandwidth platforms here…

…and that we do, as the standings are generally similar to what we saw in UnrealTournament at this resolution.  There are some exceptions to this rule, however none are statistically significant.

The same thing that happened when we moved to 1024x768x32 in UnrealTournament is happening here as well, but the performance drop is not as noticeable.  We mentioned that Expendable is an aging game and an aging benchmark, needless to say the less than 2% drop in performance from 640x480x16 to 1024x768x32 is expectable.