Fozzik
11-14-2005, 05:33 PM
Doing my normal cruise around the hardware websites today brought up lots of stories about Nvidia's new card...but there was another story (a few days old) that caught my eye.
Not so much the story itself, because the fact that AMD CPUs are superior for gaming has pretty much been beaten to death by now. What is intriguing is one particular game that was benchmarked.
It turns out that Serious Sam 2, a game that probably not everyone has even looked at, has some rather impressive optimization for dual-core processors. This may very well be our first look at what the future will be like, and I found it very interesting.
You can find the page of the X-bit Labs article to which I'm referring right here (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/28cpu-games_5.html).
What you'll see right away on the performance graph is that suddenly the X2 processors are all over the current kings of single-threaded gaming, the FX-series. AMD's dual-core chips don't just gain a little ground under this game...they actually become the fastest CPUs in the comparison.
This bodes very well for the future of multi-threaded gaming. I doubt the optimizations in the Serious Sam 2 engine even approach what is possible...this title is out now, and true multi-threaded development can take a very long time. I would expect performance graphs like this to show up more and more often over the next year, as games with even more dual-core goodness make it to market.
Not so much the story itself, because the fact that AMD CPUs are superior for gaming has pretty much been beaten to death by now. What is intriguing is one particular game that was benchmarked.
It turns out that Serious Sam 2, a game that probably not everyone has even looked at, has some rather impressive optimization for dual-core processors. This may very well be our first look at what the future will be like, and I found it very interesting.
You can find the page of the X-bit Labs article to which I'm referring right here (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/28cpu-games_5.html).
What you'll see right away on the performance graph is that suddenly the X2 processors are all over the current kings of single-threaded gaming, the FX-series. AMD's dual-core chips don't just gain a little ground under this game...they actually become the fastest CPUs in the comparison.
This bodes very well for the future of multi-threaded gaming. I doubt the optimizations in the Serious Sam 2 engine even approach what is possible...this title is out now, and true multi-threaded development can take a very long time. I would expect performance graphs like this to show up more and more often over the next year, as games with even more dual-core goodness make it to market.