The Athlon II X2 & Phenom II X2: 45nm Dual-Core from AMD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Fallout 3 Game Performance
Bethesda’s latest game uses an updated version of the Gamebryo engine (Oblivion). This benchmark takes place immediately outside Vault 101. The character walks away from the vault through the Springvale ruins. The benchmark is measured manually using FRAPS.
Gaming performance clearly goes to the Athlon II X2 and the Phenom II X2. Because of its high clock speed and very high core-to-cache ratio, the Phenom II X2 550 is actually faster than the Phenom II X4 940 in this test. Note that Fallout 3 isn't particularly heavily threaded so the X4's additional cores don't do much good here.
Left 4 Dead
AMD continues to hold on to the gaming performance lead.
FarCry 2 Multithreaded Game Performance
FarCry 2 ships with the most impressive benchmark tool we’ve ever seen in a PC game. Part of this is due to the fact that Ubisoft actually tapped a number of hardware sites (AnandTech included) from around the world to aid in the planning for the benchmark.
For our purposes we ran the CPU benchmark included in the latest patch:
In the newer game engines we see the E6300 catching up to the Athlon II X2 250. The old Pentium 4 660 starves our testbed's GeForce GTX 280 for data; it's horrendously slow.
Crysis Warhead
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haplo602 - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
can you include linux kernel compilation tests, or something similar or larger (gcc, libqt, X) ??? would help me much more than gaming and 3d rendering benches :-)virvan - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
Anand, I BEG you to include some kind of compilation tests in the "bench" application; some of us are actually programmers that spend more time building than watching or transcoding movies ;)A Linux Kernel bench + some kind of MS Visual C++ benchmark would be extremely welcome.
Btw, when could we expect the old CPUs to be added to Bench? I am specifically waiting for Athlon XP and P3/P4's.
10x
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
I really do want to include a software build test, the question is what is the simplest to setup and run, most representative and most repeatable test I can run?I'd prefer something under Windows because it means one less OS/image change (which matters if you're trying to run something on ~70 different configurations) but I'm open to all suggestions.
Thoughts? Feel free to take this conversation offline over email if you'd like to help.
Take care,
Anand
virvan - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
You could try building a CGAL demo program (http://www.cgal.org/FAQ.html)">http://www.cgal.org/FAQ.html). It is cross platform and big enough (but not too big).I am really a Linux programmer but I could try to help if you are not a programmer. I haven't booted Windows for years but, hey, we have virtual machines nowadays :)
adiposity - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
A fairly decent size build that I do is Qt under VS 2008.Instructions are here:
http://wiki.qtcentre.org/index.php?title=Qt4_with_...">http://wiki.qtcentre.org/index.php?title=Qt4_with_...
Download source here:
http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/windows-cpp">http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/windows-cpp
You can use VS2008 Express.
-Dan
haplo602 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
I have no experience with VS 2008. Can it be manualy set to certain amount of compile threads ? make has a command line parameter for this, so you can even test a single threaded compile and scale the number of threads used to exploit the drop off limit (where more threads do not yield better performance).qt is quite huge, but that's ok, since a compilation of a few minutes (linux kernel) won't tell much in the future, when processing power increases.
smitty3268 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Yes, you can add the /MP parameter in Visual Studio.adiposity - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
From the page I linked before:
Add these line to the .pro file for release version:
QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_RELEASE += -MP[processMax]
-Dan
smitty3268 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
All of Qt might be a bit large for a simple benchmark.Something like Paint.NET or NDepend might make a good C# test.
adiposity - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Use:nmake sub-src
It only compiles qt libraries, not the tools or examples.
It really does not take very long (less than 10 minutes on a Core2Duo 2.4).
-Dan