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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retrospooty - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
The demo is not full detail, its a playable test with lower image settings than the final game. Wait and see the final before we see what its "supposed" to look like.shabby - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
If its really going to look like these pics then this performance review is useless, fps will drop by half. Im hoping you're right, but im betting epic simply polished up those pics to wow everyone.imaheadcase - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Yah, i downloaded the demo. I was really disappointed. It gets boring really fast, like Quake Wars does. Nothing really innovating in terms of graphics, or fun factor, or "repeatability" over long term.I think TF2 ruined all these games. lol
Pjotr - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
This text does not match the graphs posted, where the max gain was 4.4% for ShangriLa, the other two tests showed close to 0% difference. Analysis mistake, graph error, typo or what?
Frallan - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Well since many of us today (yes even I bought one) has started to use Lappys and there is ones out now that where it is possible to play a view on how a 8600 GT w 512DDR2 and 256 DDR3 does would be nice and from 1680*1050 downwards. There are tons of these in lappys now so..Pretty please :)
Lifted - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Seconded.Blacklash - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Just grab ATiTool from Techpowerup! and reduce the clocks of the XT.Interesting article, and as someone said you have a chart with text referring to AMD above it and the actual CPU numbers labelled as Intel. The last four charts on the clock for clock page say AMD yet list Intel CPUs.
dvinnen - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Last time I checked, ATiTool dosen't support the HD 2900xt. Only one that I know of is a buggy peice of software from AMD to change clock speeds.NullSubroutine - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Ati Tools works with 2900, I use it for my overclocking/fan contol.Ati Tray Tols does not work with the 2900. They are two different programs, Ati Tools is mainly for the things I use them for, while Tray Tools is a replacement for Catalyst Control Center.
Bjoern77 - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
why bench the 2900 pro? is there a 2900pro which can't be clocked back to xt level? :)I'm glad i got a 2900pro for myself, regarding this benches i get 95% performance of a 8800gtx for 50% of it's price.