AMD's Athlon XP 2000+ vs Intel's 0.13-micron Northwood

3D Gaming Performance

To round things off we'll conclude with a bit of gaming performance using Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfeinstein and Serious Sam. All of the games were run at 640 x 480 to prevent being limited by the graphics cards although with a GeForce3 Ti 500 (and especially its successor) these games will be almost as CPU dependent at 1024 x 768 as they are at 640 x 480.

3D Gaming Performance Quake III Arena 1.30 demo four - 640 x 480 - High Quality Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz (Northwood) Intel Pentium 4 2AGHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz 271.5 258.4 251.8 245.6 239.5 239.2 235 232.4 227.1 218.6 | 0 | 54 | 109 | 163 | 217 | 272 | 326

When the Pentium 4 launched its one strength was in Quake III Arena but with faster DDR platforms for the Athlon and the release of the Athlon XP, the processor finally lost its edge. The Northwood core restored some of that original prestige courtesy of an 8% performance boost on a clock for clock basis, giving the XP 2000+ a worthy pair of competitors.

3D Gaming Performance Return to Castle Wolfenstein - atdemo1 @ 640 x 480 - High Quality Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2AGHz (Northwood) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz 166.6 163.2 159.3 157.1 155.5 151.3 148.3 143.4 138.4 133.6 | 0 | 33 | 67 | 100 | 133 | 167 | 200

In spite of solid performance under Quake III Arena, RtCW would almost always tilt its hat in favor of the Athlon XP. Again with the extra 256KB of L2 cache the Northwood has made the Pentium 4 much more competitive,with the 2.2GHz part taking the slight lead.

3D Gaming Performance Serious Sam 1.02 - 640 x 480 - Maximum Settings AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.60GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz (Northwood) Intel Pentium 4 2AGHz (Northwood) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz 134.2 132.9 129.9 126.5 114.6 106.4 96.1 93.3 88.3 84.9 | 0 | 27 | 54 | 81 | 107 | 134 | 161

The one game that has never seemed to perform well on the Pentium 4 continues to show us that there are some situations in which the Pentium 4, even the mighty Northwood, will not be able to succeed in.