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3DMark2001 SE is one of the benchmarks that favor either the Athlon or the P4, depending on who you talk to and depending on the system configuration. With the VIA KT333 chipset, the Athlon has gotten, once again, another performance boost but how much is it worth and are we going to see the same jump from the Palomino to the Thoroughbred again as we had it in Quake3 Arena?

3DMark2001SE, 1024 x 768 x 32bpp
With increasing demand on floating point performance, the Athlon ponies gain terrain. Playing Devil's Advocate again, we throw in some numbers from a PC1066 Rambus system as well as a P4 running at 2.8 GHz (2.53/146= P4 2.53 at 146 MHz FSB). Clearly, the much more expensive Dual Channel Rambus system wins here .....

Adding another layer of complexity to the graphics system, that is, another order of magnitude of triangles swaying in the wind like grass on the prairie will necessarily stress the floating point performance a bit further. Adding pixelshaders and vertex shaders in hardware will take some load off the CPU and particularly off the data buses and, thus, it is not too surprising that the Athlon core with its more efficient FPU finally sees the light of the day.

CodeCult Codecreatures
By far the most (virtual) reality oriented benchmark for graphics processors currently out there and a regular fest (feast?) for the eye, codecreatures is the prototype of what we are all waiting for in terms of gaming experience. Even though the benchmark is heavily limited by the graphics adapter, the AMD horses score an incredible home run here. Note that there are no Rambus scores here, otherwise the situation might be slightly different.

Games are games and Schnaps is Schnaps, so what about home-based content creation?

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