Socket-A Chipset Comparison - April 2001

Although we have made the argument that the trend in applications and games is towards more memory bandwidth utilization, it is still entirely too early for most of these platforms and applications/games to truly exploit the power they have.  Case in point would be Serious Sam, a game that was just recently released (thus qualifying it as a "new game") and one that proves wrong the idea that "new means memory bandwidth intensive."

The performance standings of the various solutions remains relatively similar to what we've seen in the past four games.  The difference between the 2nd place KT133A and the top performing AMD 760 is less than 2%, confirming that this isn't an extremely memory-bandwidth intensive benchmark.

DDR SDRAM still offers the 0 - 10% increase in performance today that it did in applications and benchmarks 6 months ago.  This will change, but it is still going to take some time.

Resolution/color depth goes up, performance differential comes down.  We've seen this picture before, no need to single out this particular scene.