Unreal Tournament 3 CPU & High End GPU Analysis: Next-Gen Gaming Explored
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 17, 2007 3:35 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
AMD vs. Intel - Clock for Clock
Now it's time to tackle the touchy subject: how do AMD and Intel stack up to one another? First off, let's look at identical clock speeds to compare architectures.
At 3.0GHz, granted at a CPU-bound resolution, Intel holds a 26 - 31% performance advantage over AMD. Intel's Core 2 processors have historically done better clock for clock than AMD's K8, so it's not too much of a surprise, but an important mark in the sand.
We then cranked up the resolution to 1920 x 1200, and increased the world detail slider up to 5 to give us a more realistic situation for this clock speed comparison. The results were a bit surprising:
Despite being a mostly GPU-bound scenario, Intel still managed a 9% performance advantage over AMD at 3.0GHz. We suspect that there's something fishy going on as the test is quite GPU-bound, yet going from Intel to AMD yields a reasonable performance drop.
We looked at a 3.0GHz Athlon 64 X2 and compared it to its closest Intel price competitor, the Core 2 Duo E6550 (2.33GHz) at our high res settings:
The Intel performance advantage drops to 7% on average, but it's much larger than it should be given that we're dealing with a GPU-bound scenario. Note that difference between 2.33GHz and 3.0GHz on Intel is next to nothing, thus proving the GPU-limited case, so we're either dealing with an Unreal Engine 3 issue related to either the AMD CPUs or the nForce 590 SLI chipset/drivers we used. We've let Epic know, but for now it looks like UT3 definitely prefers Intel's Core 2, even when GPU-bound.
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p30n - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
very good point.retrospooty - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
"What does this show us? At least for UT3 quad (vs dual) is rather a waste."ya, thats pretty much what they said in the article. They tested it so the results can be known.
thompsjt1 - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
"THERE ARE NO HIGH RESOLUTION TEXTURES" in the UT3 BETA demo. They didn't include them for download size reasons and I am sure they WILL include them in the real official demo and I think once you are running these high resolution textures and settings are maximized, we will see bigger difference of Nvidia vs AMD numbers.pnyffeler - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
The article spent a lot of time on the effect of the size of the cache on an Intel processor, but what about AMD? Does the size of the cache matter, or is this yet another example of Intel's Northbridge system being trumped by AMD's advantage of having the memory controller on the CPU?I have no misconceptions that AMD has a chance of topping an Intel here. I'm just curious to see how much better Nehalem will be.
P.S. Thumbs down on the CPU comparison. You said in the setup you were going to test an X2 4200, but it never made the charts. And what about an 8600 GT? I'm going to be running this game at 640x480, aren't I....
NullSubroutine - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
I believe they did not really test AMD's cpus right now due to the awaiting arrival of Phenom which is less than a month away.Looks as though the 200-250 range (RV670 bins) are going to kick some bahooty given their higher core speeds, especially at the 1280x1024, 1600x1200, and 1680x1050 resolutions.
Chaser - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
I knew with mature drivers this card would rock. It only too a short amount of time. Good job ATI and Anandtech for demonstrating this.
aka1nas - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
That's mainly because there is no AA applied because the UT3 engine doesn't support it in Dx9 mode. AA has been the R600s stumbling block.NullSubroutine - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Multi-Sampling seems to run fine, it is Super Sampling that seems to be broken.shabby - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
The beta demo looks nothing like epic wanted us to think, these pics are back from july.http://ve3d.ign.com/images/fullsize/143/PC/Unreal-...">http://ve3d.ign.com/images/fullsize/143/PC/Unreal-...
swaaye - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
It looks nothing like that because that is a ultra supersampled bullshot. Just like every single other game gets these days. In reality, UT3 looks as good as Gears of War right now, and will look a lot better once we get the high quality assets with the full game.