Benchmarks IV
On to Serious Sam 2. We're benchmarking the publicly available Valley of the Jaguar Timedemo, one that is heavily reliant on subsystem memory throughput, at 1024x768x32 Normal preferences.
If we leave RAMBUS out for a second, the 8fps difference between the fastest and slowest DDR platforms is statistically significant. This, once again, reiterates the need to keep the quad-pumped FSB of the Pentium 4 fed.
A similar story unfolds in Comanche 4, another benchmark that relies heavily on bandwidth.
I'll run Quake 3 to finish with. Although newer games have been released since ID's excellent FPS, it remains one of the best tools to evaluate your system with. I'll run 512 Fastest to give us an indication of pure bandwidth on offer.
Can you feel the Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor screaming for bandwidth ?, I can. Incidentally running the MSI 648 MAX with on-board sound enabled resulted in a drop from 396.9 FPS to 312 FPS when run at DDR3333. True hardware soundcards will illicit a performance penalty, it's just that on-board sound is usually more taxing.
