Review: AMD and DDR2: The AM2 Athlon 64s

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Game Benchmark Scores

As a watershed title for multi-processing support, SimHQ enjoys making heavy use of Falcon 4: Allied Force for dual-core testing. The two mission tests that are used in this article can be found here and the simulation itself was patched with the 1.0.6 update. Because of the rather aged nature of its graphics engine, F4: AF was tested only at the resolution of 1024x768, with the average frame rate of each test as recorded by FRAPS listed.

Test 1, titled Ground, is a short MUD moving flight that leaves Mandumi, heads over the FLOT, and attacks an enemy supply depot that has heavy AAA and SAM protection. Performance is recorded during the first six minutes of the mission with the scores shown representing the average frame rate.

The two AM2 Athlons both leave their 939 sibling behind in the Ground test, with the FX-62 outperforming the FX-60 by a solid 10%. Intel's 955 lags considerably behind the FX-62 by over 25%. And despite its smaller L2 cache per core, the X2 5000+ pulls out a small performance win against the identically clocked FX-60.

Test 2, Air, is also based on the Korea map. The mission starts with the threat warning siren blaring as the flight comes under immediate attack by Su-27s. The Air mission is shorter than the Ground test, with the frame rate recorded for three minutes.

The Air test shows the three Athlons scoring very similarly, with only a few frames differentiating the processors. The 955, however, again falls behind the AMD CPUs by a significant margin.

With the PC market still heavily dominated by titles that do not support dual cores, the performance of these parts in various simulations and games still requires some testing. Pacific Fighters is first up, configured to run in OpenGL mode with all video options set between a mix of high and medium settings and tested using the in-game "F4F vs. G4M" track.

Pacific Fighters would appear to gain more performance from clock increases of the CPUs than from system bandwidth, with the FX-62 outperforming the 5000+ by almost 10%. The 5000+ in turn only outperformed the similarly clocked FX-60 by a few frames at each resolution. Intel's 955 again fell behind by a significant margin at all resolutions.

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