Battle 1: Prescott vs. Northwood
The first battle of our Doom 3 CPU Comparison occurs between the two Pentium 4 cores: Prescott and Northwood.
You may remember from our review of Prescott that the new 90nm core was hard pressed to outperform its 130nm Northwood predecessor. Although Prescott featured twice the cache of Northwood, its longer pipeline and similar clock speeds held it back in most performance tests. However, Prescott does have one major advantage over Northwood - twice the L1-D and L2 cache. In other games the added cache has not been able to do much for Prescott, but let's see how that changes under Doom 3:
How the tables have turned - Prescott is actually faster than Northwood for a change, and at the same clock speed. A 7% performance advantage over the regular Pentium 4 3.2C is not too shabby for Prescott, but how can we be sure that the performance advantage is solely due to the cache size advantage? Look at the Extreme Edition.
The 3.2GHz Extreme Edition shares the same core as Northwood, but features a 2MB on-die L3 cache, and manages to outperform Northwood and Prescott by 15% and 7% respectively. These first benchmarks foreshadow what is soon to come and bring about a realization that Doom 3 is quite possibly the most memory/cache dependent game we've ever benchmarked.
The standings remain the same at higher resolutions, but as we've see the 6800 Ultra becomes mostly GPU limited at 1280x1024, reducing the impact of these processors. The Extreme Edition still manages to be 10% faster than Northwood, and Prescott continues to hold a lead over Northwood, just not as much at the higher resolution.
The last thing we wanted to look at in the Northwood vs. Prescott battle was how the two CPUs scaled - as we mentioned in our original Prescott review, we expected Prescott to do a better job scaling with clock speed than Northwood and we are beginning to see examples of that here in Doom 3:
Although it's ever-so-slight, Prescott's performance does seem to scale with clock speed better than Northwood.
The winner of this battle is clearly Prescott, we're sure Intel's happy that there's finally a situation where Northwood isn't in the limelight.
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PrinceGaz - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
The amount of System memory (above 512MB) is unlikely to have any impact on framerate in the timedemo as I doubt it would need to swap anything out after the first run (which is discarded anyway).I found my 128MB graphics-card (a Ti4200) gave an almost identical framerate at Low, Medium, and High quality settings in the timedemo even when gfx-card limited, provided Aniso was disabled in the driver for High quality mode (which would otherwise use 8x Aniso and impact on performance in other ways). So increasing the videocard memory from 128MB to 256MB will have no effect whatsoever on the timedemo, except maybe at Ultra quality which I didn't bother testing.
Steve Guilliot - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
#27That's the OS load balancing between the two procs. Two D3 threads aren't running at once. That's why sum utilization of both procs won't go over 100%.
Succorso - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Is this review using XP or XP64 beta with the amd64 ? Are the benefits the same using a 32bitXP as opposed to the 64 bit XP ?Succorso
SignalPST - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
its interesting how DOOM3 runs best in the Nvidia/AMD combo along with the amazing price/performance that they offer over their competitorsthe Athlon64 3000+ is on par with Intel's 3.4GHz EE, while the price difference is $840
the GeForce 6800 GT is faster than ATI's X800XT PE, the price difference being $160
so in this scenario, the Nvidia+AMD combo can save you $1000 and still outperform the ATI+Intel combo
bottom line, for DOOM3 and future DOOM3 engine games, ATI+Intel=losers
cKGunslinger - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Yes, I would also like to see some numbers benchmarking 256/364/512/768/1024/etc MB memory configurations. When does the average system have *enough* ram to run WinXP and play a game?xtf - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Would it be possible to add the cache (and other) specs of the K7s to certain charts?Because sometimes the 2700 and 2800 are slower than then the 2500 and it'd be interesting to know why.
tdent1138 - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Great article AT! I'm happy to know my 2.53Ghz @ 2.717Ghz P4 and 9800pro will happily run D3 at 8x6 in medium quality. I can now wait until HL2 at least to upgrade to whatever makes sense at the time (A64 something I imagine). Thanks again!tdent1138 - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Philbill - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Great article, Do you plan to give an update with the high end ATI cards?Phil
dangereuxjeux - Wednesday, August 4, 2004 - link
Somehow, I feel ashamed that the Sempron 3100+ crushes my ol' P4 2.4C.... please please please stop publishing articles like this that encourage me to spend any more of my money upgrading to a new AMD platform to go along with my 6800.