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

Re:1 CPU - I want 8-way !!

[NerveGas]

surpassing my normal 18 month upgrade timetable and not looking like it's about to be retired any time soon

That is precisely the reason why dual-CPU machines are much more useful as desktops that the pundits would have you believe.

You'll hear over and over that "you won't use the other CPU", or "your apps won't take advantage of it." In reality, dual-CPU desktops are so much more responsive under load that they still feel "quick" much, much longer than their single-CPU counterparts will.

I have a dual Pentium 133. With NT4 on it, it's just as quick and usable as a P3/650 with Win98. CPU-intensive tasks do take longer, but the machine is still so responsive that you really don't notice it.

Here are the reasons: First, you *are* running more than one program at once, even if you don't notice it. On the Windows side, even with one app, you still have at least 30-40 different threads and/or programs running that you're not aware of - logging daemons, mouse daemons, graphics drivers, timers, and the copious other programs that X and/or Windows will launch. Then, if you're doing net or disk access, that's even more there.

The second reason is because of the interrupts. In a dual-CPU machine, one CPU can be getting hammered by interrupts, and you still have another to run other code, such as your GUI.

After having used dual-CPU workstations, I'll never build myself another single-CPU setup again. If that 2xP133 is still a nicely usable machine, I really can't imagine how long my 2xAthlonMP 1800 is going to last!

steve