Real Gaming Challenge: Intel vs. AMD

Iria

Many of us are familiar with standard gaming benchmarks. Whether you're testing Doom 3, Half-Life 2, or Far Cry, most gaming benchmarks are made from the "Quake Timedemo" mold. They run through a sequence of recorded gameplay or simply walk the player through parts of the game, counting frames and time to give you an average frame rate.

This is good for benchmarking graphics cards because it provides repeatable and predictable results. Every time you run the benchmark, the same thing is displayed on screen. Eliminating variables introduced by normal gameplay is a very useful part of performance evaluation. Ideally, you want to eliminate every variable except the one you're trying to test (a graphics card or CPU, for instance), right?

The problem with these gaming benchmarks is that they don't test the true gaming experience during gameplay. When playing back a standard "timedemo" style recorded benchmark, many of the game's systems either don't operate, or function in a controlled, pre-determined fashion. AI, physics, and much of the core game logic are often disabled when playing back recorded benchmark demos. These are CPU-intensive tasks, and removing them from the picture can be useful in graphics benchmarking, but what if you want to see which CPUs perform best in real-world gaming scenarios?

In this feature, we'll be using a popular program called Fraps to measure performance during real gameplay in six different games across multiple genres. We'll look at how the games run faster and slower over time, and get into a bit of a discussion about "how many frames-per-second is enough." The point is to figure out whether Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 processors make for a better gaming platform, and to this end, we'll compare two CPUs that are easy on the checkbook.
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Read More / Source: ExtremeTech

Zardon

Well I think most people knew the outcome before even reading it......

Iria

Yes, but it's nice to see the numbers ... and they have some really good detail ...

Matth

Before I finish reading the article, but based on the P4 640 3.2GHz (great, that's what I have) against a 3500+ A64 (surely 3200+ would have been fairer, unless these match up on "equal price"), I'd expect the usual results to apply.

Intel does well on most other things, AMD does well on games...

OK, now I'll finish reading it.....


Pretty much as expected, and they were matched up on an equal cost (CPU) basis, though the AMD motherboards tend to be cheaper - NB. with the memory controller on the CPU, the performance variation due to motherboard chipsets, at least for CPU/RAM, is down to the lebel of measurement error.

Of course, if dual core (and implicitly, hyperthreading) gets more attention, the Intel hyperthreading will lift it somewhat against single core AMDs