Quake 4 Dual-Core Performance: AMD & Intel December 23, 2005 Chris Crazipper Angelini

Introduction

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Of course, now that multi-core hardware is both available and affordable, plenty of software will inevitably follow, right? Well, I still haven’t seen any games written with threading in mind and I do know that the development costs of a multi-threaded game are substantially higher. Not promising.

Nevertheless, I’ve spent some time talking to representatives at Intel and they’re fairly convinced that the games capable of exploiting dual-core hardware will emerge sooner than later. Intel isn’t even looking to take all of the credit on this one. Instead, the idea is that a combination of PC infrastructure and a new generation of highly threaded console hardware (think Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 here, possibly Nintendo Revolution as well depending on what IBM does with the processor) will lead to accelerated emphasis on threaded game development.

By splitting workloads into graphics rendering, physics, AI, and so on, the developer community is expected to improve realism beyond the gorgeous graphics now common to first-person shooters.

Sounds great, but perhaps you’re rolling your eyes, wondering when any of this will actually happen. It’s happening now, believe it or not. Intel recently alerted us to a fresh patch for Quake 4 (1.0.5) that enables threading in the game. Single-core chips with Hyper-Threading are said to benefit, multi-socket machines should pick up performance, and naturally, dual-core configurations will too.

Full disclosure mode: id Software and Intel independently confirm that they worked together on this project. Intel is anxious to demonstrate the potential of its latest technologies and id has the talent to make such a vision reality in short order. It helps that id has experience with threading, given Quake III’s once-functional SMP support. But there’s no mention of AMD’s role here, so I’m certainly not going to make any claims about impartiality. And that’s why the forthcoming benchmarks are separated.

Interestingly, neither Intel nor id has said exactly how threading is being handled now in Quake 4. I’d venture a guess that it has something to do with graphics, given the previous assertions regarding timedemo benchmarks and their failure to incorporate AI and physics calculations. In any case, the quoted gains can get as high as 87 percent, according to id’s readme file. Crazy, huh? Let’s see if there is any merit to those claims.

System Setup

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System Setup

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 3.2 GHz
Intel Pentium D 840 3.2 GHz
Intel Pentium 4 540 3.2 GHz

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4 GHz
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0 GHz
AMD Athlon 64 4800+ 2.4 GHz

Intel D975XBX Motherboard
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard

ATI Radeon X1800 XT with Catalyst 5.13

34GB Western Digital Raptor (10,000RPM, 8MB cache)

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

DirectX 9.0c

Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 85Hz refresh

Notes

For the AMD platform, we have a pair of 3800+ processors, which should shed some light on the value of similarly rated models, one with one core and one with two. Because they aren’t running at the same speed, though, it’s hard to really flesh out the benefits of threading. Thus, the single-core 3800+ is being compared to the dual-core 4800+, both at 2.4 GHz.

You’ll also notice that we’re running an ATI Radeon X1800 XT. In light of previously confirmed issues with NVIDIA’s latest drivers and this threading-aware patch, we’ll reserve judgment on GeForce 7-series cards for another day.

Intel Processor Results

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A Range at 3.2 GHz

Notes

Here’s where we would expect to see the greatest impact of this 1.0.5 patch. The results certainly aren’t disappointing either. At 800x600, all three of the Intel chips realize gains which are nothing short of amazing. I mean, a 69 percent real-world gain on the dual-core chips? Who has ever heard of such a thing? The Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 540 is even able to post scores 18 percent faster than pre-patch.

The numbers shrink as you move to 1280x1024 with 4x anti-aliasing, but that’s to be expected when graphics horsepower starts becoming the scarce resource. Even still, both dual-core chips pick up close to 40 percent higher frame rates. Hyper-Threading gives the Pentium 4 540 an extra 20 percent boost.

The party starts dwindling at 1600x1200. Consider that’s with 6xAA and 16xAF, though! Intel’s Pentium Extreme Edition is still able to snag nearly nine percent higher frame rates, too.

Note that there’s very little difference between the Pentium Extreme Edition and Pentium D 840, suggesting that the game is optimized for two concurrent threads. Two physical cores gives you the best performance here, as expected, and Hyper-Threading alone actually is capable of buying plenty of speed.

AMD’s Quake 4 Challenge

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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.

Conclusion

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Naturally, you’ll see the biggest difference at resolutions where you’re not bottlenecked by a graphics card. With our Radeon X1800 XT, the sweet spot seemed to be 1280x1024 on both platforms. Even 1600x1200 with 6xAA and 16xAF showed an appreciable difference, though. That’s pretty remarkable when you consider most processor debuts demonstrate very little improvement at 1600x1200. And that’s with all of the graphics goodies turned off, too.

If this is what we can expect from threaded game engines, than we’ll take more, please. And it just so happens that Activision has just followed up with a patch for Call of Duty 2 turning on the same functionality, also facilitated in part by Intel’s efforts to get games threaded. The move is interesting because, supposedly, Call of Duty 2 moves away from the Quake 3 engine used on the first Call of Duty game toward a proprietary rendering platform. If adding thread-awareness is palatable enough, who knows which existing games might get the feature next?

If Intel is going to be the one working with developers to get threading enabled in today’s popular games, then we applaud the company. After all, Intel’s Pentium processors aren’t the only ones to benefit. In fact, AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 gains significantly as well, maintaining a performance advantage over the Pentium 4 thanks to its efficient architecture. But if you have an older Hyper-Threaded chip and were accustomed to getting whipped by single-core Athlon 64s, these patches should be your equalizer. Go download them, and enjoy.