Gaming Performance with Battlefield 2 and Black & White 2

The gaming performance of the Core Duo is not as cut and dry with respect to the Pentium M as some of the other performance tests, mainly because the vast majority of games are still single threaded.  Here, we have to rely on the FP/SSE optimizations in games to overwhelm the increase in cache latency to give the Core Duo any sort of advantage over the Pentium M. 

Battlefield 2

Under Battlefield 2, we're able to see a small 3% performance advantage over the Pentium M. However, compared to the Athlon 64 X2, the Core Duo does not stand a chance. 

At higher resolutions, the performance advantage decreases in this particular game.  What performance at lower resolutions does tell us is that in this type of AI/physics load, the Athlon 64 X2 is a much better performer than the Core Duo, which does have some importance for performance in future games. 

Black & White 2

Media Encoding Performance with DVD Shrink, WME, Quicktime and iTunes Gaming Performance with Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R.
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  • ncage - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    I swear this is the best first post ive ever seen. Good Post Alex. Ya competition is very good for the market. I think intel is starting to get back on track where they need to be. It all comes down to clock speed and cost at launch. What improvements will we see with the launch of amd's next chip other than ddr2 which right now i don't really care about and possibly more cores (at least for the opteron). I am not dogging amd because for about 3-4 years ive only used AMD chips but i think amd has to raise the bar even more.
  • Calin - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link

    DDR2 for AMD would be great at least for a few things:
    moving to single channel DDR2 memory would decrease costs (in mainboards and a bit in processors)
    moving integrated graphics to single or dual channel DDR2 would increase graphic performance and overall system performance in relation to single or dual channel DDR
    As for the high end, I really don't think an increase in memory bandwidth will help - not even for dual core processors. Maybe for a quad core, but quad cores are certainly for servers, and I don't know about registered DDR2 memory to be used in them.

    Hmmm, you could try an Opteron Dual Core with single channel DDR memory, to see how much performance would be lost by going quad core, dual DDR.
  • mlittl3 - Monday, December 19, 2005 - link

    I agree with both Alex and ncage. I really disliked Intel all through out the Pentium4/Net-burst days. They were just releasing marchitecture with no improvements whatsoever. I loved AMD for their innovation and performance/watt.

    Now both companies are equal but I don't think we will see the huge fall AMD suffered from when Intel released the Pentium 4 to compete with the Athlon/K7 architecture. The beauty of competition is showing its bright colors right now. If we only had Intel, we would have a very hot/power consuming inefficient Pentium 4 based on net-burst to play Quake 4 at 5fps right now.

    Its time for the fanboys to turnover a new leaf. Go Intel and AMD!!! We love both you guys.

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