X-bit labs

April Confrontation: AMD and Intel Start the Price War (page 4)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/28/2007 | 05:18 PM ]

Gaming Applications

Relative performance of the AMD and Intel processors in gaming applications is ambiguous and the results obtained in different games are very different from one another. However, on average AMD processors turn out slightly faster than Intel CPUs prices respectively. This tendency becomes even more evident as the price of the compared CPUs goes down. By the way, low-cost Pentium D processors from Intel aggravate this tendency even more. CPUs on NetBurst micro-architecture couldn’t and still cannot compete with AMD solutions in terms of gaming performance.

Similar situation can be observed in benchmarks based on Valve Source code that will be used for future games development.

The first benchmark estimates how fast the testing participants cope with building the lighting maps, and the second – evaluates the performance during environmental physics processing. However, the diverse results of the AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors spoil the picture in this case. As we have already mentioned before, the older Windsor core is considerably faster than Brisbane in these benchmarks thanks to faster L2 cache memory.

We have also included a chess benchmark on Fritz 9 engine into our gaming test session.

This time the diversity can be observed among Intel processors in the first place. Extremely high results of the Core 2 Duo E4400 can be explained by its high clock speed of 2.0GHz, while Pentium D processors fall behind all other testing participants on different micro-architectures.