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

Nice Stats!

[mungeh]

I can't wait till the Athlon-64's come out! Maybe they'll be able to surpass a P4 3ghz?

Um Null Driver?

[vandel405]

One Function explains it all ...
bltMegsOfTextureMaps(...) {
return;
}

"hum, nah, that shouldn't mess up the results..."

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.

cool

[Sevn]

I'd pay 50 dollars!

I'll run out and buy one for my blind neighbor.
so I can cream him on tokara forest.
Maybe I can hook up a more advanced version of
that cool braille output doohickey from the
movie sneakers so he can feel the pain with
his fingers.

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