Multitasking benchmarks
Dual-core processors allow you to do more, right? That's the theory, so we've tested it by running a couple of our benchmarks simultaneously, to see how they impact on each other's performance when run concurrently.Our first scenario consisted of running our DivX encoding test whilst playing a 720p QuickTime movie, and recording how long the encode took. Our second scenario involved running the DivX encode whilst playing Quake 4 at 1024 x 768, recording both the time taken and the Quake 4 frame rate. Our final scenario involved our subjective experience of playing Quake 4 with a batch of DivX encodes running in the background – a likely activity.
The left-hand bars indicate the standalone DivX performance, as shown in our graph on page 5. The right-hand bars indicate the encoding time with the QuickTime clip playing concurrently.
We see that the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ takes 29 seconds longer to encode with the QuickTime 720p clip also taking up resources. Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700 barely registers the QuickTime load and the dual-core X6800 takes an additional 13 seconds. All multi-core processors are not created equal, obviously.
Here's the same graph but with Quake 4 as the measured metric. The standalone framerate on the left and the DivX-impacted average framerate on the right. We observed that the Athlon 64 X2 6000+'s gameplay was slightly jerky, something the average framerate of 118FPS doesn't indicate. Both Intel processors produced a smoother games-playing experience, which is also highlighted by the higher average FPS. Again, the caveat is that we're comparing processors from different price sectors, so, in price-relative terms, we shouldn't expect the AMD processor to function as well as the Intel's.
Here's the graph of the corresponding DivX framerate whilst playing Quake 4 in the foreground. All processors take a hit in encoding performance, and in this instance the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+'s hit in percentage terms is similar to the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800's.
