SimHQ.com - Technology Zone - Review: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57

The Comanche 4 benchmarking demo, a somewhat aged DX8 game that is nevertheless extremely CPU-limited, was run with texture compression and hardware shaders enabled and sound disabled.

Comanche 4

The FX-57 outperformed the FX-55 by roughly 6% and the X2 4800+ by 14%. Intel's part, however, lagged far behind all three AMD processors, losing to the FX-57 by a solid 35%; again, the additional stages Intel added to the Prescott core (31 to Northwood's 20) reduce the architecture's IPC and prevent its almost 1GHz clock speed advantage over the FX-57 from overcoming AMD's new part.

Lock On: Modern Air Combat was tested using the first three minutes of the MiG-29 Intercept demo. The in-game graphics were placed at a combination of settings, with detail, scenes, and texture details at high, water at low, heat blur off, and shadows at full to increase the CPU workload.

LOMAC

Past LOMAC testing has shown that this particular simulation's performance tends to be bottlenecked by the rendering capabilities of the graphics board installed in the test system, even with less demanding settings enabled. LOMAC therefore displays less performance variance between the tested processors as resolution is increased, yet at lower resolutions the FX-57 nevertheless outperformed the P4 3.73GHz by 10%. The FX-55 fell within the exact middle of this performance range at 800x600, with the X2 4800+ taking the middle ground between the FX-55 and Intel's part.

MS Flight Simulator 2004 was tested with high settings enabled across its four display option panels, with ground scenery cast shadows enabled. Trilinear filtering was also enabled and the max texture size slider bar placed in its middle. Sound was set to low. SimHQ's test demo consists of a short dusk flight over Hong Kong city.

FS2004

Microsoft's civilian flight sim showed fairly small performance deltas between the tested AMD parts, with the FX-57 taking an expected lead over the other processors. The FX-55 and X2 4800+ scored very similarly, yet Intel's Extreme Edition part again trailed behind AMD's offerings by a fairly substantial margin, though the gap narrowed as the resolution increased.

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