X-bit labs

Choosing the Best CPU for Doom III (page 4)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 08/24/2004 | 11:16 PM ]

Test 2: Our Own CPU-Burn Demo

We played the game long to find a level where there would be many monsters to record a high-CPU-load demo. As a result, we stopped at the Central Server Banks location on the CPU level. There are many various monsters here, and we recorded a battle with them. The test results with this demo were quite unexpected:

Our demo that has a higher monster count and loads the CPU much more than the standard one (we made sure of that by disabling graphics and witnessing a very small fps rate growth) changes the situation dramatically. Now the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition is the winner, not the Athlon 64! Then, i925X Express systems are faster than i875P-based ones – this is yet another inconsistency with the previous results. As for the correlation between the processors on Prescott and Northwood cores, it persists: the frequency being the same, the Prescott is faster.

Among the Athlon 64 models, you can notice that the memory subsystem bandwidth influences the result more in monsters-heavy game scenes. For example, every Athlon 64 with a dual-channel memory controller outperforms an Athlon with a single-channel memory controller. The amount of cache memory, on the contrary, doesn’t practically affect the result. The speed of the Athlon 64 FX-53 is close to that of the Athlon 64 3800+, while the Newcastle-core Athlon 64 3000+ is but slightly slower than the Athlon 64 3200+, which has a twice-larger L2 cache.

Well, the cache size matters with Pentium 4 models. Particularly, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz is faster than the Prescott-core Pentium 4 3.6GHz.

Comparing the results in two different demo records one is left doubtful: what processors are faster in Doom 3? We need one more test to answer correctly.