The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion CPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 28, 2006 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Hyper-Threading and SMP Tweaks
Another topic some people will find interesting is Hyper-Threading. We've seen a 10 to 20% performance increase with dual core processors, but HyperThreading is often regarded as a "poor man's SMP". We took the Pentium 4 641 chip and ran test both with and without HyperThreading. Here are the results:
| Pentium 4 631 Hyper-Threading | |||
| HT Off | HT On | % Improvement | |
| Oblivion Gate | |||
| Min | 18 | 17 | -5.56% |
| Avg | 25.1 | 28.4 | 13.15% |
| Max | 30 | 35 | 16.67% |
| In Town | |||
| Min | 16 | 18 | 12.50% |
| Avg | 29.1 | 31.2 | 7.22% |
| Max | 45 | 48 | 6.67% |
| In Dungeon | |||
| Min | 22 | 23 | 4.55% |
| Avg | 44.9 | 48.6 | 8.24% |
| Max | 119 | 130 | 9.24% |
We were surprised to find that HyperThreading actually brought some pretty substantial performance improvements. The outdoor environment gets the biggest improvement, increasing average frame rates by 13%, but even the town and dungeon tests show a 7-8% increase. Certainly, this is not the difference between playable and unplayable frame rates, but even a small increase is nice to get.
So far, we've been looking at Oblivion performance without performing any special tweaks. While there are certainly many other tweaks that we could make to try to improve performance, we wanted to focus on changes that wouldn't affect the graphics quality but might still improve performance. We turn to TweakGuides.com and used their SMP-enhancing performance tweaks. For this test, we used an Athlon X2 4400+, once again with and without the tweaks enabled.
| Athlon X2 4400+ SMP Tweaks | |||
| Tweaks Off | Tweaks On | % Improvement | |
| Oblivion Gate | |||
| Min | 32 | 34 | 6.25% |
| Avg | 44.1 | 45.7 | 3.63% |
| Max | 53 | 55 | 3.77% |
| In Town | |||
| Min | 28 | 30 | 7.14% |
| Avg | 48.5 | 48.9 | 0.82% |
| Max | 75 | 74 | -1.33% |
| In Dungeon | |||
| Min | 36 | 37 | 2.78% |
| Avg | 74 | 74.1 | 0.14% |
| Max | 178 | 180 | 1.12% |
As with HyperThreading, the SMP performance tweaks bring slight improvements in performance. However, none of the improvements are higher than 5%, which is roughly the margin of error for our benchmarks. The outdoor benchmark does see the largest increases, however, so some people might find these tweaks to be useful. Unfortunately, we also noticed some graphical glitches with all of the SMP tweaks enabled, so we can't honestly recommend using these tweaks for the small increase in performance. Your mileage may vary, so feel free to try them out; if you need more performance, though, you're better off looking at some of the other modifications you can make.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
36 Comments
View All Comments
kmmatney - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
If you look at the Tom Hardware charts, plot the performance of the 256K cache Semprons on a chart, and then extrapolate to higher frequencies, a Sempron at 2.45 GHz will perform better than the Athlon 3500+, and closer to the Athlon 3700+. It does start to fall back a little in the heavy multitasking benchmarks, but for gaming and content creation its very close to an Athlon 3700+.For instance, if you take the Far Cry benchmark at 1280 x 1024 (other benchmarks behave the same):
Sempron 256K 1.4 Ghz = 126.9
Sempron 256K 1.6 Ghz = 140.0
Sempron 256K 1.8 Ghz = 151.6
Sempron 256K 2.0 Ghz = 162.7
This forms a linear curve with very little drop-off with speed increase
Now extrapolate to 2.4 GHz
Sempron 256K 2.4 GHz = 186.95 (predicted)
Sempron 256K 2.45 GHz = 189.95 (predicted)
Sempron 256K 2.5 GHz = 192.9
Athlon 3700+ San Diego: 190.9
Athlon 3500+ Venice : 186.2
Athlon 3200+ Venice : 176.5
For a given amount of money, an overclocked Sempron paired with a high end video card will give you the best bang-for-buck for gaming.
JarredWalton - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
I'm not talking about as an overall platform; I'm talking specifically about Oblivion performance. Clearly, looking at the 3500+ vs. 3700+, the jump from 512K to 1024K L2 helps quite a bit. Looking at Celeron D, 256K and a lower FSB kills performance. It's not too much of a stretch to guess that Sempron chips will do proportionately worse in Oblivion than in many other games/applications.kmmatney - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
Also, the low end S939 Athlon 64s have come down in price, with the cheapest now at $109, so right now, I would agree that Socket 939 is the way to go now, even for a low end system.If you look in the area of the game that counts, the outdoor scenes, the extra 512K of cache gives you an extra 2 fps. An educated guess would put a Sempron 3100+ running at stock speeds at 28.5 fps. Overclocked to 2.4 Ghz it would be around 35 fps. Not great, but very playable.
JarredWalton - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
True, you won't notice 2 FPS difference. The thing is, a few people are talking about overclocked Sempron versus stock clock speed Athlon 64. If you're going to overclock one, you have to overclock the other. My experience is that socket 939 overclocks far better than socket 754, the so a lot of those Athlon 64 3000+ chips can hit 2.5 to 2.7 GHz on air cooling.JarredWalton - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
Oops -- posted too soon.You might be talking about five to 10 frames per second difference at that point, which would definitely be noticeable. Of course, if you're looking at running a Sempron with the typical PCI express or AGP card, you will likely be GPU limited anyway. Even a GeForce 7600 GT is going to struggle with the outdoor scenes.
Powermoloch - Friday, April 28, 2006 - link
Yeah, I was wondering about that too :). My gaming rig is being powered by 3100 sempron paris and I did overclocked it @ 2.069 Ghz. Oblivion went out pretty fine at most times, and I'm really enjoying the game.