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| Athlon vs Athlon4 |
| Thunderbird, Palomino and the effect of SSE
(Review by MS, August 2, 2001)
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Top
Test Configuration, Benchmark Overview
Controll Runs, SiSoft Sandra
Gaming Applications
Professional Applications
Wrapping it up
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Gaming Benchmarks
When talking of games and SSE optimization, one game immediately comes to mind: Quake3 Arena. Other games appear not to be SSE optimized, Rage's Expendable is one example. Since most application benchmarks claim an modest performance increase of some 3-7 % of the Palomino over the Thunderbird, Expendable might be a good starting point.
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It is interesting that Expendable Timedemo shows the opposite of the memory benchmark results. That is, in the SiSoft Sandra memory benchmark, the Palomino is roughly 4.5 % slower, whereas, in Expendable, it is 4.9% faster. Since Expendable strongly depends on memory bandwidth and raw CPU power, one might conclude that the actual performance gain of the Palomino is partially obscured by a performance hit with respect to memory throughput.
Quake3 Arena
Quake3 Arena is one of the flagship applications for the Pentium4 , so one might suspect some SSE optimizations here.
The average performance delta between the Thunderbird and the Palomino is about 7.5% which could be borderline SSE dependent. Keep in mind though that any optimization cannot cause the rest of the CPU or, for that matter, the graphics card, to jump over its own shadow. Except for the Normal setting, the average performance increase is about 8% which suggests that there is some Role for SSE in it.
SSE Optimized Games
The average performance delta between the Thunderbird and the Palomino is about 7.5% which could be borderline SSE dependent. Keep in mind though that any optimization cannot cause the rest of the CPU or, for that matter, the graphics card, to jump over its own shadow. Except for the Normal setting, the average performance increase is about 8% which suggests that there is some Role for SSE in it.
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| => Professional Applications => |
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