Scumbria,
When P4 optimized games come out, the benchmarks should be quite impressive.
We will see when it happens, and how much it will matter.
Right now, let's take the one game where P4 beats Athlon, that is Quake. Using 640x480 resolution with 16bit color the score is:
P4 1.5: 210
Athlon 1.3: 197
These are frames per second. But on a normal Windows 2000 installation, your video refresh rates is limited to 85 Hz, and human eye possibly see the difference between 197 and 210, even if it was possible to get the video card / monitor to operate at such a refresh rate.
Once you move to higher resolution, such as 1024 x 768 with 32bit color and above, all the processors score the same, meaning that you are limited by the graphics card, not by processor.
In the other tests that seem to be limited by the CPU at refresh rates 40 - 60, which can be noticeable, such as Unreal Tournament and and MBTR, Athlon leads.
In other tests where refresh rates are very high (and therefore differences between processors don't matter that much) such as Evolva, MDK2 and Expandable, Athlon leads again, in some cases (Expandable) it dominates
Here are the scores: tomshardware.com
So the one place where I can see an improvement that is meaningful to the user (through some kind of SSE optimization) are games like UT and MBTR. If the status quo in performance and pricing remains, we would have to see a lot of games that are like UT and MBTR, that are rewritten somehow for SSE, so that P4 can match or beat Athlon. And at the same time the prices of P4 would have to come down to match Athlon.
Unless all of this happens very quickly, the present situation will continue, that is that only morons or people completely unfamiliar with computer technology will buy P4.
Joe |
