AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 4: Desktop Performance

Gaming Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003

Because we were using such a slow GPU we didn't force maximum detail settings, instead we just let UT pick the best settings for the GeForce4 MX 440 and stuck with them.

Gaming Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby 640x480x32 - Autodetect Settings AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 3.0C AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) 83.5 77.7 74.8 74.7 74.6 | 0 | 17 | 33 | 50 | 67 | 84 | 100

Things really got interesting as we looked at gaming performance; while all three Athlon XPs performed basically on par with each other, the Opteron was able to distance itself quite well from the rest of the pack. Just by looking at the Athlon XP scores you would think that we were GPU limited, but as you can see by the fact that the Opteron extends a 12% lead we are also platform limited with the Athlon XPs.

Gaming Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch 640x480x32 - Autodetect Settings AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 3.0C AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) 43.4 39.5 36.3 34.7 34.6 | 0 | 9 | 17 | 26 | 35 | 43 | 52

The botmatch test is much more CPU bound and thus we see a slightly larger spread of scores; the Opteron continues to take the crown with nothing short of a 25% performance advantage over an identically clocked Athlon XP. We can attribute the majority of this performance advantage to the CPU's on-die memory controller, as well as the Opteron's improved branch prediction unit.