AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 4: Desktop Performance

Gaming Performance (continued)

Gaming Performance - Quake III Arena Demo Four 640x480x32 - High Quality Settings AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 3.0C AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) 122.6 114.1 85.1 84.8 84.8 | 0 | 25 | 49 | 74 | 98 | 123 | 147

Quake III based games also seem to favor the very low latency memory access the Opteron can offer.

Gaming Performance - Jedi Knight II Demo JK2FFA 640x480x32 - High Quality Settings AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 3.0C AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) 74.2 65.8 39.7 39.7 39.7 | 0 | 15 | 30 | 45 | 59 | 74 | 89

The domination continues under Jedi Knight II; at first we thought something was wrong with the Athlon XP test bed, however no number of re-installing, switching motherboards and reconfiguring the system could get any of the Athlon XPs to perform any better. When paired with a PCI GeForce4 MX 440 and at such a low resolution, the Athlon XP platform ends up being bottlenecked very early on for some strange reason.

Gaming Performance - Comanche 4 Benchmark Test 640x480x32 - Autodetect Settings AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) Intel Pentium 4 3.0C AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.167GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz - Barton) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) 35.2 32.7 31.2 30.3 29.8 | 0 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 | 4

If these benchmarks are any indication of Athlon 64 performance, then we can look forward to one excellent gaming processor this Fall...