Game Developers mostly prefer AMD. (from Voodoo Extreme: voodooextreme.com
In an article addressing the merits of SSE versus 3DNow, Voodoo Extreme solicits feedback from the big game developers. Since gaming rigs to some degree drive this market, I thought it worth a post. Where the developer mentioned their favorite platform, I excerpted the salient comments below. I've included the pro-Intel ones, as well as pro-AMD.
John Carmack, id Software - ...now it really doesn't matter much to us if someone chooses an Intel or AMD processor.
Jim Malmros, Insomnia Software - AMD and nVidia seems to be going the right way with the nForce, so I think I will have to say I like AMD alot better, at least right now.
Nathan d'Obrenan, Firetoads Software - AMD seems to be taking all the right roads in processor design, and by keeping in mind backwards compatibilty with 32 bit processors specifically before making the leap to 64.
Phil Steinmeyer, PopTop - From the tests I've seen, AMD is faster overall, and SDRAM is sooooo much cheaper than RDRAM, so for the moment, AMD is the right choice - I bought a new 1.1 Ghz Athlon system for my home about 3 months ago and I love it...
Joel Huenink, 4D Rulers - Well I gave up on what I refer to as "alien CPUs" back when I bought my first cyrix 166. It was pretty cool on some things, but any program that needed the FPU was really slow with it. Then we tried had a few AMD systems around, but once again, they seemed weak compared to the equivalent Intel chip. After a few problems here and there with those systems, we stick to Intel now, they always seem to run the best and be compatible with more software and hardware.
Brian Hook, formerly of id and Verant - Let me preface my comments with fair disclosure: I own stock in AMD, so
there is a potential for bias.
Here's the short answer in list form:
- Athlon rocks. Very fast, powerful.
- I'm execited about Athlon and 760MP configurations
- Athlon4 also rocks.
- I'm not an OC enthusiast or a home PC builder, so not being able to find a good Athlon machine from a "big name" company like Dell bothers me.
- Athlon's have been saddled with extremely crappy chipsets for a long time. The 760 is nice, but hard to find and expensive. Hopefully the SiS 735 and Nvidia nForce are going to change this. VIA and Ali are jokes.
- DDR is dirt cheap, I just wish there were more Athlon motherboards that had 4 RAM slots so you could go to 4x256MB configs.
Chris Rhinehart, Humanhead Studios - Which do I prefer over AMD or Intel? Well, my primary development box is Intel-based, but my game machine is an AMD. However, my dev box is pretty old, so it's definitely time to upgrade. Right now, I have my sights set on the new dual-Athlon systems.
eCo |
