Spring IDF 2006 Conroe Preview: Intel Regains the Performance Crown
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 7, 2006 3:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Gaming Performance
The one area where AMD has been the clear leader for years has been in gaming performance - Conroe changes everything.
Updated: In Don MacDonald's keynote he also provided us with another reference point for Conroe's performance, this time under Call of Duty 2. We have no idea what settings they ran at but the results we saw were Conroe at 111 fps and a Pentium Extreme Edition 3.73GHz scoring 90 fps. But the most interesting gaming tests are below:
First off we've got Quake 4 running the 1.0.5.0 patch at 1280 x 1024 with High Quality settings. The only demo available was Intel's own demo but nothing looked out of the ordinary with the recording. We tested with both r_useSMP enabled and disabled, first the SMP disabled numbers. Updated: The Quake 4 scores have been updated as mentioned in our follow-up article.
With SMP disabled, Conroe holds a 25% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2. Enabling SMP provides a similar 24% performance advantage.
Next up is a Half Life 2 Lost Coast demo, once more an Intel supplied demo but there's only so much you can do to a demo recording to make it favor one CPU maker over another:
Conroe's performance advantage extends to 31% under Half Life 2, talk about a complete role reversal here.
We finish off this page with Unreal Tournament 2004 and a 20% performance advantage for Conroe.
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ninjit - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Explain how 1280x1024 is GPU limited on an ATI X1900 Cross-fire system (i.e. 2 cards)???Idiota!
radzio - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Media encoding tests (e.g. DivX) were not GPU-limited. Result ?Conroe 2.66MHZ is 30% faster than overclocked Athlon Fx60 (2.8MHz).....
JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
532 Average FPS in F.E.A.R.?I'd sell my opteron right now if that were the case.
/typo notifier
Justin Case - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Unless your monitor happens to support a refresh rate of 532 Hz, it would be kind of useless. Not to mention that your eyes can't really tell the difference for anything above 120 fps or so (that's one of the reasons why no monitor bothers with refresh rates higher than that).sp1nfer - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
Please cut the 'our eyes can't see more than <insert pointless number here>' bs. You have no concrete fact to prove it. Let me give you some: some games play smooth at 30fps but as they drop below 25, gameplay gets hindered.And please provide a link to the Hz:FPS ratio/link.
Having 500fps in a game with a processor and 300 with another clearly shows there is more room ahead for the 500fps processor even if you can't enjoy all of them.
Fenixgoon - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
See wht happens when Intel actually has to produce a good CPU?I'm no Intel fanboy, I go for what fits my budget. Of course, I can afford neither an A64 or a Conroe, but hopefully this will drive other CPU prices down on both sides.
flyck - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
p4 was also a good cpu. only not the best.looking @ those benchmarks i would have to say i'm pretty amazed by it. AMd might get 10% closer with AM2.... but i think they'll have a problem with there K8 like it is now. Well i think we are back in the days of northwood(800) vs XP. maybe a bit worse for amd, but we have to wait for 6 months to say that.
SLIM - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
WOW, Awesome performance. Can't wait to see the real reviews against the then current competition.PS: Please fix the average framerate graph for FEAR, last I checked average framerate was not usually 3x the maximum (or reverse the titles of the graphs or something).
goz314 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I'm sure the AMD cult and Intel naysayers will try to find something wrong with this initial impression of Conroe's performance, but for the time being it's nice to see the 800 pound gorilla "wake up" again.BrownTown - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I'm an Intel fan and I see stuff wrong with these benchmarks. Its just a litle bit of a stretch to see that much improvement on benchmarks set up by Intel and not suspect something fishy is going on.