Spring IDF 2006 Conroe Preview: Intel Regains the Performance Crown
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 7, 2006 3:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Gaming Performance
The one area where AMD has been the clear leader for years has been in gaming performance - Conroe changes everything.
Updated: In Don MacDonald's keynote he also provided us with another reference point for Conroe's performance, this time under Call of Duty 2. We have no idea what settings they ran at but the results we saw were Conroe at 111 fps and a Pentium Extreme Edition 3.73GHz scoring 90 fps. But the most interesting gaming tests are below:
First off we've got Quake 4 running the 1.0.5.0 patch at 1280 x 1024 with High Quality settings. The only demo available was Intel's own demo but nothing looked out of the ordinary with the recording. We tested with both r_useSMP enabled and disabled, first the SMP disabled numbers. Updated: The Quake 4 scores have been updated as mentioned in our follow-up article.
With SMP disabled, Conroe holds a 25% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2. Enabling SMP provides a similar 24% performance advantage.
Next up is a Half Life 2 Lost Coast demo, once more an Intel supplied demo but there's only so much you can do to a demo recording to make it favor one CPU maker over another:
Conroe's performance advantage extends to 31% under Half Life 2, talk about a complete role reversal here.
We finish off this page with Unreal Tournament 2004 and a 20% performance advantage for Conroe.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Just to list a few:Doom 3 test uses standard file (Demo1)
Far Cry uses standard maps
Battlefield 2 tests have been linked a few times (I created them; ask for a link if you can't be bothered to dig it up)
HL2 maps have been made available before; I don't know that anyone else has our current maps, though.
FEAR uses the built-in benchmark
DivX/Xvid encoding (Sum of All Fears Ch.9) can readily be found if you want
Winstones is used elsewhere and *could* be downloaded/puchased (it's no longer officially supported)
Sysmark is used elsewhere and can be downloaded/puchased
Worldbench is used elsewhere and can be downloaded/puchased
SpecViewPerf is publicly available
PCMark, 3DMark are publicly available
There are plenty of tests that can be corroborated. Do some of our tests use internal files? Sure - every site does that. Generally speaking, though, when configured with identical hardware our results are consistent with what's reported elsewhere. Let's not forget that most other results are just as proprietary as any of our results; that's the real problem.
StriderGT - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Will you get into the trouble of producing numbers for the A64 X2 2.8 that would resemble intels's benchmark? At leats where this is possible. I think it would create lots of cretive buzz...JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
I'd reproduce it if I had such a chip. ;)Maybe someone else at AnandTech can help out. If I can get my hands on an FX-60 and appropriate other hardware, I could give it a shot. The only test we can directly verify is FEAR, of course - the others used Intel demos, so we'd only be able to show scores for our demos on other games.
Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Thanks Jarred, I guess I could have explained myself better.
That's basically my point. Nobody's tests have been independently verified. If someone is going to throw out the testing that Anand did at IDF, then pretty much ALL testing Anand has ever done needs to be thrown out also.
I'm attempting to tell people that you can't pick and choose for arguments, there's too many smart people here to fall for that. Either Anand's testing is valid (I think it is), or it's not. Someone can't say that one day it's valid and anothr it's not just because it doesn't show the results they want it to.
Sunrise089 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
No, this is wrong. What Jarred posted means that if you or I set up a rig with the same hardware as AT uses, normally an FX-57 and 2x512meg of DDR-400 2-2-2-? for game benchmarks we could get the EXACT SAME RESULTS AS THEM, within a reasonable margin of error, so long as you use the same testing files they did, which according to Jarred are freely available. Just because most other sites have slightly different test rigs by no means suggests AT's tests are not independently verifiable. To state otherwise calls into question AT's integrity as an information source.Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
That's the same thing I said.Sunrise089 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I see that now. I think I let my desire to defent AT outrun my need to carefully read the post I think I disagree with. Sorry.Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Hey, no problem!StriderGT - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Anand did not configure the test at IDF. They reported the results...HUGE difference
StriderGT - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
"Okay, show me one web site that has ever independently reproduced Anand's results.To the best of my knowlege, none of the files that Anand uses for benchmarking are available to the public."
Timeless piece of human intelligence:
Okay I will show you some berries and my closet full of benchmark files
PS If you do not trust anandtech's reviews how do you trust them reporting intel's?!?!?