Media Encoding and Gaming Performance Commentary
Gamers have always been an important and loyal market for AMD, but recently, Athlon has lost quite a bit of ground to Intel in this area. The gaming benchmarks were a very pleasant surprise on our Athlon64 level Opteron. The 2.0GHz Opteron on an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card significantly out-performed the same setup with Pentium 4. As you can see in our benchmarks, the older Quake 3 is about 10% faster on the 2.0GHz Opteron than it is on the fastest P4 that we have tested.Even more surprising is the performance of the A64 level Opteron on Gun Metal 2. This DX9 benchmark is an up-to-date gaming benchmark that shows the Opteron out-performing P4 and Athlon 3200+ by a whopping 42% to 54%. As we continue through Unreal Tournament 2003, our Opteron running at A64 speed is the clear gaming champion at 12% to 19% faster than number 2. We also are experimenting with the new X2 Benchmark as an addition to our gaming suite. X2 is heavy on Transform and Lighting effects, and therefore, adds another dimension to game benchmarks. The 2.0 Opteron was also the best performer in X2, but not by the margins we see in other game benchmarks.
This gaming performance is very good news for AMD, as Athlon64 appears capable of mopping the floor with the competition when it comes to gaming. The on-chip memory controller has had the promise of making this kind of difference in gaming performance. In as much as our Opteron at 2.0Ghz is representative of Athlon64 gaming performance, the Athlon64 will be a must-have for dedicated gamers. Keep in mind that this is a comparison of 32-bit gaming performance. As effective as the Athlon64/Opteron appear to be in this area, we can’t wait to see 64-bit gaming results.
XMpeg conversion benchmarks show nForce3/Opteron significantly faster than the 3200+ Barton, with a performance improvement of about 20%. This is still not enough to bring it to the best Pentium 4 performance levels, but it does make the 2.0 Opteron competitive with the best encoding performance.
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StuckMojo - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
I'd like to see some benchmarks where the opteron's advanatges could really be used:
1) some database or rendering benchmarks on workstations with more than 4GB of ram and large worksets that use more that 4G.
x86/pentium cpus have to use a segmented memory architecture becuase of the 4G address space, so it's kind of like swapping, and is alot slower than direct access that a 64 bit chip has.
2) how about some 64bit benchmarks on linux?
Quake3 runs natively on linux, why have I seen none? Laziness, or lack of technical knowledge?
sprockkets - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Intel will have a 100w toaster oven to compete with AMD, that and probably SSE3 just to make everyone recompile and distance AMD again. That and of course a 1mb cache.Isn't that Xenon have a 1MB but L3? That means it has 1.5MB, and still lags.
PointlesS - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Impressive cpu but it would've been nice to see how much of an improvement the extra 200mhz made...unless I'm missing something here...does anyone have a link that has a 1.8ghz opteron and a 9800 pro?Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Minor correction on page 2. nForce was the first AMD based board to use HyperTransport IIRC, not the nForce2Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Hrm, as I am sure Intel has samples of the Opteron CPUs, its kinda surprising to see them not have anything significant ready to counter.. I highly doubt the Prescott will perform more than 10-20% better than the fastest Northwood P4.. If can't, then it'll definitely be slower than these new Opterons.. Let's see if Intel can counter, or else its gonna be a bloodshed for them..Evan Lieb - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
#13,Because CPU supply right now is EXTREMELY tight. Wait until the end of the month for more info on dual Opteron/A64 performance numbers. :)
Take care,
Evan
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
This is all very exciting stuff for AMD fans...but as a dually enthusiast, I wonder why there are no benchmarking stats for a top-end Athlon MP workstation/gaming solution? Why include the Xeon dually and not an Athlon dually? Certainly in the Content Creation areas we'd see a landslide for the good old dual MP mobos...imagine a 150 MHz FSB PC3200 2.6 GHz overclocked Barton 2500+ dually w/ the Radeon 9800...best price/performance ever IMHO...Wesley Fink - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
As Anand and many others have been saying for months, Athlon64 is supposed to be single-channel Socket 754 and able to use unbuffered memory. Since the rumored FX Enthusiast version is said to be Socket 940 it will fit Opteron boards like the Asus SK8N, so will be dual-channel. Thus far the only ones I have seen from these aleady RELEASED motherboards have required registered memory - ECC or non-ECC - but that could of course change with later releases.tazdevl - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Also, I was under the impression that the socket 939/940 boards will support unbuffered memory.tazdevl - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
I'd like to see a temp comparison between all the CPUs.