| Review: AMD and DDR2:
The AM2 Athlon 64s
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Microsoft's Flight
Simulator 2004 was configured with high settings enabled
across its four display panels, with the max texture slider
set at full and hardware lights at four. SimHQ's demo is a
short dusk flight over Hong Kong city.

FS2004 testing resulted in a fairly
even performance field, with the 5000+ failing to outperform
the FX-60 for the first time. The scores show a pattern of
being bottlenecked by the graphics board, though, as the resolution
scaled upwards, yet the 955 still lost to the Athlon 64s at
the lower resolutions.
Chaos
Theory was tested using the Lighthouse demo. The shader
profile for SM2.0 was used, with parallax mapping and high
quality soft shadows both disabled.

The FX-62 again leads the tested processors,
outperforming the 5000+ and FX-60 by roughly 5% and 7% at
the lower resolutions, respectively. And yet again, the 955's
game performance falls considerably short of results produced
by the tested Athlons. The frame rate, however, levelled out
considerably above 1024x768, with the Chaos Theory obviously
becoming dependent upon GPU performance at the higher resolutions.
Call
of Duty 2 was tested with a custom demo from the Prisoners
of War single-player map. The game was configured in its DX9
rendering mode with all texture options manually set at high.
And with the 1.0.1 patch, Call of Duty 2 has included multi-processing
support.

Call of Duty 2 sees the two AM2 CPUs
outperforming both the FX-60 and 955 by significant margins,
though this is the one set of game tests produced for this
article that resulted in the 955 outscoring any of AMD's processors.
It's safe to assume that the title is somewhat system bandwidth-dependent
for higher performance at the lower resolutions since the
5000+ has an identical clock rate as the FX-60 yet only half
the L2 cache.
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