AMD's Athlon XP 2100+ The Last of the Palominos

3D Gaming Performance

To measure 3D gaming performance we've chosen the Unreal Performance Test 2002 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. For information on the Unreal Performance Test 2002 you can read about it here and here.

Next-Generation 3D Gaming Performance Unreal Performance Test 2002 - 1024 x 768 x 32

AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 91.1 89.8 87.4 86.0 82.7 81.8 79.5 75.9 70.9 65.4 | 0 | 18 | 36 | 55 | 73 | 91 | 109

Quite possibly the most important gaming benchmark is the Unreal Performance Test 2002 because it illustrates performance under next-generation games such as Unreal 2, UnrealTournament 2 and other games based on the next-generation Unreal engine.

Here we see that the top performers are the Athlon XP 2000/2100+ and the Pentium 4 2.2GHz. In fact, you can go all the way down to the Pentium 4 2A and still remain within 10% of the top performers.

What's most impressive about this chart is that we're able to attain this type of CPU scaling at 1024 x 768 in a next-generation game courtesy of the power of the GeForce4 Ti 4600.

3D Gaming Performance Return to Castle Wolfenstein - 1024 x 768 - High Quality

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz AMD Athlon 1.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 166.3 163.3 160.1 156.6 152.6 148.4 144.4 138.6 137.7 127.6 | 0 | 33 | 67 | 100 | 133 | 166 | 20

We originally started using Quake III Arena but with frame rates approaching 300fps at 1024 x 768 it quickly became obvious that we needed a new benchmark. Thus we used Return to Castle Wolfenstein which is based on the Quake III Arena engine but much more CPU and GPU intensive. The end result is pretty self explanatory with the top two performers being the Pentium 4 2.2GHz and Athlon XP 2100+, separated by less than 2%.

The Athlon XP and Pentium 4 (Northwood) performance curves begin to intersect and almost lie upon one another. Going forward we'd expect the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 to be very competitive gaming CPUs with the performance between the two being negligable at higher clock speeds. At lower clock speeds it's clear that the Athlon XP has the Pentium 4 beat.