Socket-A Chipset Roundup - August 2001

3D Gaming Performance

Most games aren’t incredibly memory bandwidth intensive in that they won’t use gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, but they are much more demanding than most of the applications we’ve looked at thus far. 

Quake III Arena is very well written and benefits tremendously from efficient memory accesses and low latency operation.  The SiS 735 manages to maintain a 6% advantage here, unfortunately that is only at 640 x 480.  As video card limitations increase (with higher resolutions) that performance advantage will deteriorate. 

In this case, all of the DDR platforms hold approximately a 7 – 10% advantage over the SDR platforms.  DroneZ is a much more up to date engine and is representative of what we can expect from performance in future titles: much more of a dependency on memory bandwidth than what we’re used to currently.

The picture doesn’t change much with AquaMark.