X-bit labs

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

Real-World Gaming Performance of AMD and Intel Chips. Head-to-Head Comparison of Microprocessors

ExtremeTech has decided to find out which mainstream processors are the best for gaming. The author of the issue recently posted compares gaming experience on AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and Intel Pentium 4 640 microprocessors in a series of benchmarks, which incorporate a number of different real-world gaming scenarios. Each game was played for a fixed period of time for three times. The FRAPS utility was used to measure performance during real gameplay in six different games across multiple genres.

“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%!,” concludes ExtremeTech.

• ExtremeTech: Real Gaming Challenge: Intel vs. AMD.