AMD's 0.13-micron Thoroughbred - Cool but Slipping at 2200+

3D Gaming Performance

When it comes to most 3D games there's generally very little performance to be found by heavily optimizing for SSE2 or 3DNow! on either of these processors and thus the performance is mostly dependent on the overall platform (e.g. FPU capabilities, chipset, memory latency/bandwidth, cache latency/bandwidth, etc...).

We'll start off with our favorite 3D gaming benchmark - the Unreal Performance Test 2002. For an explanation of what this test is and why it is so significant, be sure to read our 15-way GPU Shootout that we used to introduce the test. In short, the benchmark uses the current build of the Unreal Engine (that will power games such as UnrealTournament 2003 and Unreal II) and serves as a great indication for future performance in games that use the engine.

Next-Generation 3D Gaming Performance Unreal Performance Test 2002 Build 918 - 1024 x 768 x 32 Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4B 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz 50.0 49.7 48.4 48.1 47.5 46.0 45.8 44.3 42.4 42.3 38.0 35.8 33.2 | 0 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60

The Athlon XP seems to be fine for next-generation 3D game engines as it is able to come within 0.3 fps of the 2.53GHz Pentium 4 here. It will be interesting to see how Doom 3 performs on the two processor families but the workload should be quite similar to what we're seeing here. The biggest determinant of performance will end up being the GPU in these next-generation games as the CPU's role will be diminished to mostly physics and AI.