Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part II: A Deeper Look

Gaming Multitasking Scenario 1: Heavy Downloading

In the first article, we ran under the assumption that gamers wanted to have as little running in the background while playing a game.  While that ended up being true for a lot of folks, we also received quite a bit of feedback asking for some pretty intense multitasking tests while gaming.  The requests were far more intense than even the most strenuous setup that we came up with, but because of the demand for such benchmarks, we spent some time putting a few together.  Note that this is by no means supposed to be an exhaustive comparison of all gaming scenarios. We are working on creating more and we apologize if your desired scenario didn't make it into this review, but keep sending in suggestions on how you play and we'll do our best to model some benchmarks after how you use your computer. 

The first test basically performs all of the tasks from our first Multitasking Scenario, with the exception of DVD Shrink.  We have Firefox loaded, but with all 12 tabs from the third test, iTunes is running and playing a playlist, and Newsleecher is downloading headers.  We kept Newsleecher in this test simply because it's the best way for us to be able to have a fairly CPU/disk intensive downloading task running in the background while still maintaining some semblance of repeatability.  So, replace Newsleecher with BitTorrent or any other resource-consuming downloading that you may be doing and you're good to go. 

Of course, Norton AntiVirus 2004 and Microsoft's AntiSpyware Beta were also running in the background. 

First, we ran our Doom 3 benchmark:

The tables have now been turned. While the Athlon 64 held a 30% lead with no multitasking, it's now outpaced by both Intel processors, with the Pentium D holding a 25% performance advantage.

It's no surprise that having two cores yield less of a performance impact to having more applications run in the background.

Doom 3 was actually quite playable on both machines; although, loading the game and the levels took a lot longer on the A64, and there's a lot of stuttering during the actual game. 

The Pentium 4 platform was quite a bit better, but there is a definite reduction in performance.  Obviously, the Pentium D did the best out of the group, but you still notice the performance drop. 

Next, we ran the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory benchmark:

Once again, the Pentium D is ahead of the Athlon 64, but the improvement in minimum frame rates is particularly impressive.  The Pentium D offers twice the minimum frame rate of the Athlon 64 in this scenario.