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Strong performance so far in game benchmarks from the new processor, let's see how it carries that on to Quake3. The Pentium 4 is traditionally strong in Quake3 so the XP2200+ has its work cut out here. While it will be interesting to see what CPU is the quickest since Quake3 is a strong indicator of good system throughput, especially at lower resolutions, the result will be very strong on both CPU's.
The XP2200+ can't live with the 2.4B, especially at the lower resolution of 1024x768. While the result is largely irrelevent, it does nevertheless highlight one of the downsides to the Athlon XP as time goes by. The Pentium 4, especially in its 'B' configuration at 133MHz (533MHz) front side bus, has the ability to generate large amounts of the data that Quake3 needs and move it around much quicker than the Athlon XP. At 133MHz front side bus, the Athlon XP is limited to making use of ~2.1GB/sec of memory bandwidth, irrespective of what's available from the memory controller. The P4's advantage in Q3 is largely down to its advantage in this area.
As the multiplier increases and so the CPU clock rises, AXP is screaming out for an increase in the memory bandwidth between it and the rest of the system. A move to 166Mhz fsb, running synchronous to a DDR333 memory controller and a drop in the multiplier, just like Intel with Northwood 'B', would benefit this CPU immensely.
Let's take a look at Serious Sam: The Second Encounter and see if the same holds true.
These results were double checked to make sure something silly like Anisotropic filtering wasn't enabled during the runs on the XP2200+ but they ran the same each time. Serious Sam is another game based benchmark that enjoys the P4's large system throughput for the same reasons outlined above. Neither game offloads that much onto the card so system throughput and CPU speed play a large part in these results.
So the P4 claws something back in the game based benchmarks and we have one left for the decider, Comanche 4 from Novalogic.
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