AMD’s Quake 4 Challenge

Returning the Favor

Notes

It was a morbid curiosity that drove me to add AMD’s Athlon 64 to this explorative exercise. I know, I know, the 1.0.5 patch mentions Intel by name as a collaborator with no word on AMD. But hey, a dual-core processor is a dual-core processor and should still work, right?

Talk about understatement of the year (or what’s left of it). While it isn’t optimized for AMD64, frame rates on a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ are 63 percent faster at 800x600 with threading enabled. The 4800+ also feeds back good gains.

The good news continues at 1280x1024, where 77.4 frames per second turn into 101.7 on the Athlon 64 3800+. AMD’s 4800+ gets a boost as well, while the Athlon 64 3800+ demonstrates that you can’t turn on SMP mode with a single-core processor.

Things tighten up at 1600x1200 under the influences of 6xAA and 16AF. Small speed increases are apparent, but it’s pretty clear given the similarities between the AMD and Intel test beds that the invisible hand of graphics compels us to search for more 3D horsepower—something along the lines of SLI or CrossFire, maybe.