AMD's Athlon-64 Benchmarked With UT2003

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AMD's Athlon-64 Benchmarked With UT2003

Posted by chrisd on Wednesday February 19, 2003 @08:08PM from the portable-64-bit-goodness dept.

Sander Sassen writes "Wondering about the performance of AMD's Athlon-64? Want to how well it runs in 64-bit mode? Hardware Analysis managed to run a few benchmarks on a AMD Athlon-64 demo system using the 64-bit version of Epic' Unreal Tournament 2003. There's also an update with the latest about Athlon-64, Opteron and mobile Athlon-64 including streaming video and pictures of a quad Opteron server."

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And, to quote Ryan from above... by Svartalf · 2003-02-19 20:27 · Score: 4, Interesting

"1) The OpenGL renderer is not as fast as the Direct3D renderer at this time. This is not the Athlon64's fault. You can see this on 32-bit Windows, since it can use both renderers. Since this is a Linux port of the game, we're using the GL renderer on the Athlon64 at this time."

I saw that and determined that they were more Windows type people and plain flat didn't know that the OpenGL renderer is much weaker (not due to the API, but due to this being much the first cut of the thing...) than the D3D. What they measured was pretty good considering that detail.

--
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
64-bit should give 15% increase by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-19 20:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

If one compares the claimed 42fps with other cpu:s, it seems it is at a level of a Celeron 500 MHz...
There is something fishy here as the UT2k3-makers themselves claimed there is a 15% increase in 64-bit mode (on Windows). Normally Quake3Arena for Linux is on par with the Windows version, so it should not be the OS' fault either.
Re:Whoa! by XnetZERO · 2003-02-19 20:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

The Mac port? Rumor has it that there was such a thing, but for some reason it disappeared into the ether and was never seen again. ;)

Anyhow, if the game ever comes out for the Mac I'll buy it, but for some reason I think I might die of old age first. :p
The Quad Proc niche by Talisman · 2003-02-19 21:31 · Score: 5, Interesting

I recently got into video editing. Until now, I've never needed anything faster than a single CPU system.

Now I understand, completely, what those who do rendering gripe about when it comes to CPU speed never being fast enough.

2:57 of video takes my 1GHz w/ 1GB RAM machine nearly 2 HOURS to render. Just for 3 stinking minutes of video!

The fastest current single CPU would only decrease that number to about 40 minutes, which is still too slow.

A dual CPU solution would bring it down to 20 minutes, but again, if I ever wanted to render even 15 minutes of video, that would be 1 hr 40 mins of CPU time.

And forget doing anything else with the computer while it's rendering. It will start dropping frames like mad, and you have to start over.

Now a 4-way workstation is something that would work. With a 4-way 3GHz Opteron system, I could render in near real-time, and a regular sized MB, if not slightly oversized, could handle 4 procs.

SuperMicro is the only MB mfg. I know of that makes a 4-way board, but it's for Xeons and is insanely expensive ($1800 +/- $100) and that's before you add the overpriced CPUs.

If AMD came out with a moderately prices 4-way workstation, they could get the CAD/CAM, video editing, 3D modeling, rendering and compiling crowd all at once, in addition to the freak gamers and Gotta Have The Best Even Though I'll Never Use It crowds.

The 4-way system is a neglected niche. AMD should fill it.

Talisman

--

"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
1. Re:The Quad Proc niche by radish · 2003-02-19 22:18 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I have to admit to being a bit confused by this. I'm by no means professional, but I do do some video rendering - mainly taking recorded programmes from my Tivo as mpeg files and then cutting out adverts, adding captions and downsampling them to SVCD. I use Vegas Video on a Athlon 1.3ghz with 1gb of ram under w2k and the render takes about double time - in other words give me your 2 hours and I can render 1 hour of video. And there's no chance of dropped frames - why would there be? If I use the machine for other stuff the render just slows down.
  
  What is it I'm doing which is so different to what you're doing, and therefore so much faster?
  
  --
  ---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
2. Re:The Quad Proc niche by AssFace · 2003-02-20 02:07 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  look into clustering. especially if you are a programmer and like/want to tinker with a few of the options.
  either Beowulf, which some may argue is becoming dated or at least not as useful in comparison to the other being Mosix (or rather OpenMosix for most of us).
  
  You certainly won't get the fast memory pipeline access that the on board SMP systems will give you, but the cost of physically separate systems is lower.
  Video and/or 3d rendering lends itself well to distributed tasks because you can effectively outsource each frame to a different processor and then put them back together later (AFAIK there are even systems that do this on the pixel level - but I know less about that than the fram based level).
  
  IMO OpenMosix requires far less time in setup, and it seems to be more forgiving to different system makeups (some faster, some more ram, etc).
  
  I use it for financial analysis and on a single system it would take me a few days to go through all of my data. each time I add a node to the system, it nearly halves the amount of time (Due to network bandwidth issues and different speeds of nodes it isn't ever as straightforward as just halving the speed each time a node is added).
  I can put together a single node for under $400 (Athlon 2.1G and 256MB Ram - I don't need much ram for what I do) - so for a quad system, it would be $1600 in computers and about $100-200 in networking. You could then double that for the same cost of less (save when buying in bulk).
  That is $3600 for an 8 processor system - I don't think you will ever see that in an on board configuration and the speed difference isn't enough that you would care (if something finishes 10 mins earlier, but costs $5K more, is it worth it? for video, probably not)?
  
  The large issue with clusters is that as they grow in number, their physical space that they take up increases, as does power consumption, heat dissapation, and noise.
  
  --
  
  There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Re:A question... by WoTG · 2003-02-19 21:37 · Score: 5, Interesting

Well, not directly answering your question, but... x86-64 (the 64 bit architecture that the Athlon64s and Opterons use) is more than just more bits. There are also a lot more registers which will help out code that is recompiled, because programs won't need to do do quite as much moving of values into and out of memory (or cache, I guess). There are other improvements too, but I think the register count is one of the most important ones - with respect to playing games at least. =)
Re:A question... by forgoil · 2003-02-19 22:03 · Score: 4, Interesting

A wider memory buss can help, but it is not really connected to the instructionset or the ability to crunch larger numbers.

One thing that the Opteron has going for it though is the fact that x86-64 have more registers. This makes a real difference. I wonder if the mmx registers are shared with the registers, and if not, why not?