Cache Size Impact on Performance
As we continue to look at the Athlon 64 platform with respect to Half Life 2 performance it's now time to find out how much benefit the 1MB L2 Athlon 64s gain over the 512KB L2 parts.
Given that we've already shown Half Life 2 to be sensitive to both memory bandwidth and latency on the platform, we wouldn't be too surprised to see some pretty big differences between 512KB and 1MB L2 Athlon 64 processors.
at_canals_08 |
at_coast_05 |
at_coast_12 |
at_prison_05 |
at_c17_12 |
|
1MB L2 |
116.69 |
134.45 |
121.67 |
118.51 |
80.39 |
512KB L2 |
111.56 |
126.2 |
117.35 |
115.75 |
74.14 |
With a performance advantage as large as 8%, the 1MB Athlon 64s (and Athlon 64 FXs) do surprisingly well under Half Life 2 when compared to their normally competitive 512KB counterparts. While 8% alone isn't much, combine that with the advantage of a 128-bit DDR memory bus and the Socket-939 Athlon 64 platform can offer a reasonably high performance improvement over even the Socket-754 solutions.
SSE/SSE2 Impact on Performance
Just for kicks we turned off the Athlon 64's SSE/SSE2 instruction set support to see if that impacted performance in any way:
at_canals_08 |
at_coast_05 |
at_coast_12 |
at_prison_05 |
at_c17_12 |
|
SSE/SSE2 Enabled |
116.12 |
140.43 |
123.37 |
113.69 |
83.15 |
SSE/SSE2 Disabled |
117.64 |
140.94 |
125.85 |
116.55 |
82.56 |
Despite minor variations in performance, it doesn't look like SSE/SSE2 is doing much for the Athlon 64 under Half Life 2. We just had to fulfill our curiosities.
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Avalon - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Yep, I felt there should have been an Athlon XP in there, since many users are still running XPs, and many enthusiasts are running overclocked mobile bartons. I just assumed that an XP 3200+ would be equivalent to the 2.8ghz P4 they benched, and went from there.arfan - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
I think Half Life 2 is more friendly than DOOM3. We can play HL2 with old video card (entry level video card). But to play DOO3 we need mid range video card :(blckgrffn - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Agreed, there are a lot of us that are still running our XPs. Hard to beat the bang for the buck on that platform, but just how much are we missing out?Jeff7181 - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Awesome article. Only thing I would have liked to see is an Athlon XP3200 (as outdated as it is) in the mix as well just to see where it would fall on the charts.acejj26 - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Good to see Anand writing articles again. I get tired of seeing grammatical and spelling errors in articles written by some of the other guys here. Anand's articles are always well thought and just seem more professional. Good job. I also appreciated the Mac Mini article yesterday. Keep it up.Dranzerk - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Good article, came out in the right time I was considering upgrading my ATI 9700 Pro/2.4ghz P4 to a athlon 64 or a 6600GT. Guess its the Nvidia 6600GT :DThe only thing holding me back (others to) is the AGP vs PCIx deal, but with NF4 chipset with AGP it should be a no brainer now to just stick with old AGP card and have lot of life in it for time to come.
George Powell - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Awesome article. Made for a really good morning read.morcegovermelho - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
There is an error on page 2. The value for athlon 3500+ at_coast_12 is 11.58.
Great article