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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD)
AMD 213.50+6.2%Dec 19 3:59 PM EST
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To: Scumbria who wrote (7381)9/2/2000 2:51:52 PM
From: minnow68Read Replies (3) of 275872
 
Scumbria,

One of my theories about P4 is that because of the high memory bandwidth but poor internals, we will see P4 win every gaming benchmark when the frame rate is already so high that no one cares but P4 will lose when one really wants a higher frame rate (because fps is visibly slow). For example, does anyone really care if Quake III runs at 190 fps instead of 140 fps? Both numbers are way beyond the ability of humans to notice. But people will care about 25 fps compared to 18 fps. And my guess is that Athlon will have the higher frame rate when frame rates are low.

My reasoning is that when frame rates are high, the bytes are flying over the bus like nobody's business. The processor is spending a relatively small amount of time performing calculations and a huge amount of time moving things around. Score one for P4, but few will care because there will not be a visible impact.

When frame rates are low, the processor is spending most of its time performing calculations on a given frame rather than moving the frame. Score one for Athlon, and people will care because it will be a visible difference.

We can already see this happening in the Register's P4 Quake 3 benchmarks. In Normal mode, P4 destroys T-bird 194.8 to 148.9 for a 30.8% advantage for P4. But when moving to high quality mode (much more calculation per frame), we see P4 at 92.6 fps and T-bird at 90.9 fps giving the P4 only a 1.8% advantage. My guess is that a game with graphics complex enough to drop the Athlon's fps to 30 would drop P4's to 20.

Mike
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