Opteron Gaming Benchmarks

bishop writes "Ace's Hardware has published some Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark results on a 1.8 GHz Opteron 244. The Opteron servers out right now don't have AGP, but this issue has been nullified, literally, through the use of the 'null renderer' option in UT2003 to bypass the display output. At 1.8 GHz, the Opteron manages to outpace all previous Athlon models, though it does still fall behind the 3 GHz Pentium 4 by about 8%." Only 8% slower in performance with a 40% slower clock speed. Not too shabby.

Comments

Athlon versus P4 performance..

[Vector7]

You know, I find it pretty interesting how vastly AMD's chips outpace the P4 clock-per-clock.It's widely acknowledged that the P4 gets less done per clock than the P3 did. Some people have said that the P4's memory architecture is a disaster, or that it is pipelined TOO deep, but I've got a sort of conspiracy theory about this. Granted I'm not a computer engineer, and know just enough to hang myself with, but here goes:

I think they've manipulated the design so they can deliberately increase the clock rate for marketing reasons, without getting proportionally more performance out. Basically I suppose they've taken the longest paths through the chip and stuck latches all over the place so that the overall cycle time can be reduced, but operations that used to take one clock cycle now may take two. When 1.8 GHz AMDs can nearly match the speed of a 3 GHz P4, I don't think this is an entirely unplausible theory.

On the other hand, maybe the P4 really just is a pig. There was some discussion on usenet a while back about how it takes upward to 2000 clock cycles to enter and exit an interrupt handler on the P4, something which an old 486 could do in ~45 cycle IIRC (and I don't recall exactly, but I think the Athlon today can do an INT/IRET pair in a few hundred cycles). Curious how in hyper-optimizing these chips for the most common cases of execution, performance of these sorts of periphery operations goes all to hell.

That said, I'm really looking forward to having 64-bits on the desktop. =)

Re:Athlon versus P4 performance..

[Sevn]

I know my bud with a p4 3.04 gets steaming pissed
when my athlon 1700+ running a 184 bus times 12
crushes his machine by 10 minutes on 'make world'
on FreeBSD. Even using a -j flag to take advantage
of the HT goodness doesn't seem to help him much.
I thought it might be I/O, but his drive is faster
than mine too with hdparm -t and -T.
My UT2003 benchmarks are faster than his even
though he has a ti4200 with 128mb and I'm running
a ti500. All the supposed memory bandwidth just
doesn't seem to be there for him. Nforce2 plus
Athlon TbredB overclocked is a great way to fly.

I don't trust the numbers.

[Guspaz]

Oddly enough, Anandtech's numbers show the complete opposite: The Opteron beat ALL other CPUs at ALL games. Including the P4 3.0C in UT2K3. Take a look:

http://anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1818&p =6

Re:Um Null Driver?

[ChadN]

But seriously. The graph indicates that they used the "null" driver for all setups (and even tested with graphics boards of VASTLY different performance to make sure they all performed roughly the same with the "null" driver). So one can infer it does test CPU and memory speed (primarily).