Socket-A Chipset Comparison - April 2001

Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing is definitely a much newer game than Expendable, but is arguably not too much more fun to play.  This is another Direct3D game, but because it is relatively new, with most of the image quality features turned on the performance of the game isn't as platform dependent as Expendable.  This type of performance measurement is actually quite useful since it resembles what you experience in most real-world situations, that is a balance between video card, CPU and platform limitations. 

The first thing you'll notice is that attainable frame rates are considerably lower than what we've seen so far.  The top three placeholders have not changed however the fourth place VIA KT133A 100/133 has been replaced with the ALi MAGiK1 133/133 DDR.  The performance advantage it offers over the KT133A 100/133 isn't massive, in fact it is under 2%, but the fact of the matter is that the place switch does occur primarily because of an increased value placed on memory bandwidth in this benchmark.  The increased value still isn't beyond anything else we've seen, but the PC2100 DDR SDRAM does manage to creep ahead slightly.  It is still not enough to make a huge difference in performance but it is worth noting when we talk about future application trends.

The performance isn't dependent on memory bandwidth enough to allow the MAGiK1 running at 100/133 to surpass the same platform running at 100/100.  As we pointed out in the cachemem latency comparison, there is over a 100 cycle latency penalty incurred when running the MAGiK1 at 100/133 vs. 100/100.

The KT133A at 100/133 (essentially a KT133) is a total of 10% slower than the top performing AMD 760 solution.  This, if anything, is an indication of the future benefits of higher bandwidth memory solutions such as DDR SDRAM.

Increasing the resolution here does increase the limitations provided by the testbed's GeForce2 Ultra, thus closing the performance gap between the contenders.  The standings still remain the same and the best way to summarize the performance drop is to look at the AMD 760 133/133 DDR compared to the KT133A 100/133 that resulted in a 10% gap at 640x480x16.  The comparison now results in an 8% gap, not too much of a difference but still worth noting.