Final Words
After our Doom 3 - CPU Battlegrounds article, we already knew what to expect from CPU performance under Half Life 2. At this point, Intel's Pentium 4 architecture does take a backseat to AMD's Athlon 64 when it comes to gaming. With performance advantages of around 15% at the same price point, the Athlon 64 does offer a noticeable increase in performance over the Pentium 4 in Half Life 2. The extensive physics engine in Half Life 2, especially as seen in Half Life 2 Deathmatch, is very CPU dependent and thus we see a real world performance advantage to the Athlon 64 over Intel's Pentium 4.
Not only is the game very CPU intensive, but because of its dependency on a fast CPU, Half Life 2 also appears to be quite dependent on high available memory bandwidth and low latency memory at the same time. Half Life 2 is actually the first game where we've seen this degree of dependency, which does make for some interesting predictions for the CPU/platform requirements of the next generation of games. Despite what we have seen in recent years, it does look like the next generation of games that employ more sophisticated artificial intelligence and physics will be quite CPU and platform dependent, just as they are GPU limited. The balance will obviously vary from scene to scene in the games, just as we've seen with Half Life 2, but the limitations will be there.
In terms of the right speed CPU to pair up with your GPU, if you have a high-end GPU (X800 or 6800GT class) then the faster you go the better off you are. Mid-range GPU owners will find that anything the speed of an Athlon 64 3000+ (Socket-939) will offer the best bang for your buck, with diminishing returns after that. If you happen to have an older Radeon 9600/9700/9800 based card, then even an Athlon 64 2800+ will be overkill for your GPU. If you are stuck with one of those older but still well-performing GPUs, don't bother upgrading your CPU unless it's something slower than a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 - you'd be much better served by waiting and upgrading to dual core later on.
The impact of the CPU on gaming performance is in a transitional stage right now. As more games use Half Life 2 style physics we will see similar impacts with regards to CPU performance, but at this point there's a great deal of work being done on multithreading game engines for the next generation of games. So while the games coming in the immediate future may behave similarly to Doom 3 and Half Life 2, it's the games that follow that will truly be interesting.
Check back in the coming weeks for more information on multithreading, dual core and the future of CPU performance in game engines among other areas...
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Roooooooooooooooooot - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Ommmmm ... yes, a very nice article :)
More than any article I've seen, this one made the point about the power of AMD processors for 3D gaming.
"Megahertz Shmegahertz" could have been the title. The 3.8 Pentium running neck and neck with a 2 GHz AMD CPU. Now I understand !!
One place I worked had hundreds of Dell Workstations. They gave us dual xeon ultra-SCSI jobbies. It may not sound like much, but 2 1 GHz Xeon's with an 18 Gig U160 or was it 320 SCSI HDD and an ATI FireGL graphics card was what I had.
I would love to see an article about corporate CAD machines, AMD vs. Intel with various scales of video cards.
bamacre - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
1,000,001 demands for A XP benchies, how about one for high-end Northwood P4's ?? Please?AkumaX - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
I one MEELIONTH the motion, i wish there were a XP barton benchmark somewhere in there, not just w/ the XP3200 (2.2ghz) but also w/ 2.3ghz and 2.4ghz (since most of us appear to also be running o/ced mobiles :P)michael2k - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
What did you expect? People were demanding the HL2 CPU article in the Mac threads... and lo and behold, the next day, Anand has posted the HL2 CPU article.You can either get something now, or you can get something finished... very rarely can you get both :)
Crassus - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
I was also quite surprised that the article still appeared. I'm glad it did, but I think it falls short of Anandtechs high standard:1. For comparison, at least two AXP (two to see how it scales) should be in the test field
2. As previously mentioned, Processor/speed/cache/socket. There is more that just one Athlon 64 3000+
3. Including CAS 2,5 would have been nice as this seems to be the default for people using mainstream DDR3200 RAM
4. What's the deal with the Athlon 3500+ in diagramm 3 on page 2?
Something else bothered me:
Quote: "If you are stuck with one of those older but still well-performing GPUs, don't bother upgrading your CPU unless it's something slower than a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 - you'd be much better served by waiting and upgrading to dual core later on."
Common wisdom seemed to be that especially games don't take advantage of multi-threading. Do you have any new information that upcoming games are geared more towards multiple CPUs/cores/HT?
quanta - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
The test didn't show the impact of using partial precision vs full precision on NVIDIA cards. As some people have mentioned[1], Half-Life 2 doesn't need full 32-bit precision to run smoothly. In effect, NVIDIA card is running in speed crippled by the game's designers.[1] http://3dgpu.com/archives/2004/12/01/boost-perform...
DavidHull - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
I second the need for SLI configurations to be included, as many reviewers have found them to be extremely limited by the CPU.AtaStrumf - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Interactive 3D charts in flash. Khm,... can it be done?AtaStrumf - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
I was starting to think this article has been bined, but fortunately it wasn't.First of all I agree with the need for an AXP 3200+ in the charts. It's still a very, very common PCU!
Secondly this is only an OK article by Anand's standards. The first thing that really bothered me was how the CPU's are marked by some very long but also very useless names, like
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (2.4 GHz)
Intel Pentium 4 570 (3.8 GHz)
This takes a lot of room on the carts but still tells me nothing about Cache size or Socket type. I suggest names like:
A64 3400+/S754/512kB/2.4GHz (its shorter and says a lot more)
Same thing for Intel: P4 570/Socket/Cache...
And how in the hell did you come up with CAS3? Most DDR 400 RAM (excluding OEMs) is CAS 2,5 and not 3 or 2. I appreciate the memory tests very much though, I just regret the very basic mistake in the underlaying assumptions.
I understand it was a low priority, seriously delayed article, but I just can't shake the feeling it could have been so much more.
One of these days I'm gonna have to take some time and put together a demo of how data is properly presented.
Questar - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
"Next let’s take a look at at_coast_05, another very GPU limited test that has a good deal of NPC interaction as well as GPU limiting elements:"
How the hell could this be GPU limited if the difference from top to bottom of the graph is > 50%?