No AMD XPs?

Despite the article's claims, Call of Duty 2 does NOT use a modified Quake 3 engine. It is a new engine.

Great piece of review, keep it up so ordinary folks like us can base your review to choose wisely. 10 out 10.

I'd have included, even if it was a bit of a stretch for a desktop right now, a fast Pentium-M for reference. Some people are using those chips in that fashion, but the bigger wave of that changeover in cpu's (Intel based anyway) will come with Yonah and Merom. The Pentium-M thrown in the mix would have given folks an idea of that expectation.

Still very glad to read this article front to back!

Thank you

Pretty sure they wanted to stick to desktop intended CPUs that the vast majority of people will be using.

So no Pentium-Ms or other mobile CPUs, and no Opterons or Xeons etc.

Still, I'd like to see a Pentium-M in the mix as well. Shuttle has a new SFF using Pentium-M out, and for people wanting a quiet computer that may see some gaming (slap a 7800GT in it) it could be nice to see where they stand.

Were these tests run with the new forceware 8x.xx drivers that can take advantage of the dualcore cpus? I couldn't make out it from the article. I know I am pretty simple :o

BTW dont u think that the latest drivers from Nvidia are the source of the high 2nd core utilization - not the engine alone???? - try with older drivers

Now with that said I would like to see some older systems have a newer faster card shoved in them and see how low you can go before you do need a cpu upgrade. Of course you can't put a pci-e in an agp slot but what about some pci-e boards for the old athlon xp!

Hi, it would be very nice to see similar test for those users who are not playing games but, e.g. rendering films or graphics. Film making is getting more and more popular and that's a great difference wait for 4 hours or 2. Of course, players may do (render) that as well. You should use programs like Adobe Premiere Pro (not old v.6) and Photoshop CS (as you have done time by time). The title would be - a good computer for film makers. That would also show your site targeted not only for teenager players but a bit more older or/and advanced segment. Comment on 1GB vs 2GB memory in current review - actually no difference! Just use that money for other not for memory. Thanks in advance.

How about some extra line with 1280 x 1024 resolution and high quality settings on. Why? New LCD-monitors have native 1280 x 1024 resolution. And on other extra line what Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz would get. Hard to understand when comparing only new prosessors. Numbers are now too blind.

ok

I would like to see similar test / figh between Intel and AMD but placed in PhotoShop or/and Premiere arena... or maybe some other application (not WORD, please).

Why not NForce mobo for Intel? Asus P5N32 would have scored way better than P5WD2 in games.

If you would have actually had the games running at high resolution with details on it would have been a better article. Who the hell plays at 1024X768 @ medium detail with a 7800gt? If you would have cranked the settings up it would have shown that the cpus are pretty much the same, because the graphics card starts to bottleneck when u have high res, AA, AF, etc.

isnt the articles name

"Contemporary CPUs and New Games: No Way to Delusions!"

and why on earth would you bottleneck a cpu comparison to a graphics card????? People who play online games would propably turn the detail down anyway, if they are using a higher resolution, to get the max fps, bottlenecking it to the cpu.

Besides, a small framerate in a game is far more frustrating then a few seconds or minutes, longer process time that doesn't need any interaction. Who waits behind the computer watching the progress bar for several hours?

Good Job! AMD still the gaming satisfaction

Excellent

good job !

Real Gaming Challenge: Intel vs. AMD

"different games have different "thresholds" that must be maintained in order to keep play fun and smooth."


Pentium 4 640 (3.2GHz) / Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2 GHz)
1 Go, GF7800GTX, Sound Blaster Audigy 2

"We'll be looking at overall performance, but we're not really concerned with average frames-per-second this time around. We're looking at how consistently each CPU is able to maintain a frame rate that makes for a smooth experience.

Intel has a benchmarking analysis program out now where they took user data from a bunch of gamers and discovered that it's not having a really high average FPS that matters; it's consistency. Above 60fps, gamers didn't really feel that the play experience was improved. But when the game dropped below 45fps, it started to impact how much fun they had. But Intel only used first-person-shooters (FPS) in its research. While popular, their methodology does leave out other genres.

We agree with this, in principle, but different games have different "thresholds" that must be maintained in order to keep play fun and smooth. We think 45fps is a good low threshold for FPS games, but a real-time strategy game, for example, requires a lot of interaction with a static interface and can be perfectly enjoyed as long as the frame rate stays above 30fps. Some competitive online games are a bit more demanding. As we get into the performance analysis of each game, we'll discuss these target frame rates. The point to take away is that it's critically important how often each CPU is able to maintain performance above this target speed.

With each game, we'll present three graphs. The first will show the results (frame rate over time) for all three benchmark runs on the Athlon 64 system, the second the Pentium 4 system. The third graph takes the average of all three runs for each system and presents them on the same graph, so you can easily compare the overall performance of one system against another.

[...]

The results speak for themselves. The average frame rate across all six games for the Athlon 64 system is 61fps, while the Pentium 4 averaged 54fps. That’s a 13% difference – not tiny, but not large enough to bowl us over. What is more important, we feel, is how often a game runs slowly enough that you can feel it. This methodology is consistent with the one used by a new performance analysis tool in the works at Intel. We picked arbitrary performance thresholds, but these are numbers based on years of game playing experience. We picked frame rates at which you actually notice an impact on how the game feels, not the absolute minimum required to play and enjoy a game. This is where the Athlon 64 really kicks the Pentium 4 in the teeth. Our P4 system spent almost a third of the time, across all games, beneath our target minimum FPS. The Athlon 64 system, on the other hand, spent only 14% of its time there. This is a difference of a whopping 121%!,”

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1854733,00.asp