Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part II: A Deeper Look
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 6, 2005 12:23 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
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.
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segagenesis - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#30 - Excuse me for trying to save money also. Last I checked Intel was still more expensive. Not to mention Extremely Expensive edition.rqle - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
All i know is that i alt-tab / alt-enter to the desktop running general apps all the time while gaming. I bought two system so i can download while gaming on the other system for this very reason. To do both at the same time would cause the ftp software to go into idle state with the fastest download speed at only 8-10kb/s. I can set the ftp software at a higher priority but then it would just cripple my gaming. These dual core look very promising, but ill hold out for amd dual core.GentleStream - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
I'm interested in benchmarks that would be relevant to scientific computing and software development.How about benchmarking a parallel compile of some non-trivial software package such as building the
gcc compiler. That takes quite a long time on my 4 year old laptop.
danidentity - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
So when are the Pentium D and the new chipsets being released?Spill it Anand. ;)
Turnip - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#23What about the fourth option? That by the time AMD's desktop dual core processor is available, Intel will have a new dual core processor available. Now, whether we're talking more than "two cores bunged on a chip", or whether we're simply talking a jacked up FSB (which has, remember, always given Intel a hefty jump in the encoding arena), I don't know. But I do know one thing...
Intel is a very big company and Intel has very big sleeves. ;)
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
SpearhawkGood catch, the graphing engine didn't regenerate those graphs properly. Fixed now.
Take care,
Anand
Questar - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
I love this, all the AMD fanboys having seizures over that fact that an Intel CPU can actually have some benefits.It's been a blast reading all these posts the last two days.
Spearhawk - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
He said that a 2.2 GHz dualcore Athlon 64 wouldn't compete with the 2.8 GHz Pentium D at encoding. Notice the encoding part, he said nothing about other stuff.I'm guessing one can know that by looking at dual CPU Opteron systems, the dualcore A64 won't beat them, and if they can't beat a 2.8 Pentium D then the dualcore A64 won't be able to either.
Is there something wrong with the graphs in the DVD Shrink/Game test? The comments doesn't seem to match them (especialy the part about the minimum frame rate being equal)
PorBleemo - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
How do you calculate the system wattages like that? I have been attempting to find detailed information on how to do this but have turned up nothing yet.Thanks!
Illissius - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link
#10 - you are quite correct. anyone who games with a processor-intensive background task running at the same time _on a single core processor_ is insane. the reason I wanted to see benchmarks is to see whether dual core changes that.theoretically, I don't see why it wouldn't work:
- you only have one GPU, and only the game is using it
- you have two processor intensive tasks - the game and the background task, and two cores, one for each
hence, no conflict. whether that actually holds up in the real world is/was the question (if the background task is multithreaded, or heavily uses reasources other than just the processor, then naturally the above doesn't hold true).