Unreal Tournament 3 CPU & High End GPU Analysis: Next-Gen Gaming Explored
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 17, 2007 3:35 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Who Cares about Clock Speeds?
So far we've figured out that UT3 likes large caches, sees a huge benefit from two cores (and a minor improvement from 4) but what about raw clock speed? We took an unlocked Intel Core 2 Duo processor and ran it at 333MHz increments from 2.0GHz up to 3.33GHz, plotting performance vs. frequency on the chart below in all three flybys:
At 1024 x 768, a reasonably CPU bound resolution, the curve isn't as steep as you'd expect. Over a 66.5% increase in clock frequency, overall performance goes up less than 28%. Things like L2 cache size and microprocessor architecture in particular seem to matter more here than raw clock speed.
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retrospooty - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
The demo is not full detail, its a playable test with lower image settings than the final game. Wait and see the final before we see what its "supposed" to look like.shabby - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
If its really going to look like these pics then this performance review is useless, fps will drop by half. Im hoping you're right, but im betting epic simply polished up those pics to wow everyone.imaheadcase - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Yah, i downloaded the demo. I was really disappointed. It gets boring really fast, like Quake Wars does. Nothing really innovating in terms of graphics, or fun factor, or "repeatability" over long term.I think TF2 ruined all these games. lol
Pjotr - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
This text does not match the graphs posted, where the max gain was 4.4% for ShangriLa, the other two tests showed close to 0% difference. Analysis mistake, graph error, typo or what?
Frallan - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Well since many of us today (yes even I bought one) has started to use Lappys and there is ones out now that where it is possible to play a view on how a 8600 GT w 512DDR2 and 256 DDR3 does would be nice and from 1680*1050 downwards. There are tons of these in lappys now so..Pretty please :)
Lifted - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Seconded.Blacklash - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Just grab ATiTool from Techpowerup! and reduce the clocks of the XT.Interesting article, and as someone said you have a chart with text referring to AMD above it and the actual CPU numbers labelled as Intel. The last four charts on the clock for clock page say AMD yet list Intel CPUs.
dvinnen - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Last time I checked, ATiTool dosen't support the HD 2900xt. Only one that I know of is a buggy peice of software from AMD to change clock speeds.NullSubroutine - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Ati Tools works with 2900, I use it for my overclocking/fan contol.Ati Tray Tols does not work with the 2900. They are two different programs, Ati Tools is mainly for the things I use them for, while Tray Tools is a replacement for Catalyst Control Center.
Bjoern77 - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
why bench the 2900 pro? is there a 2900pro which can't be clocked back to xt level? :)I'm glad i got a 2900pro for myself, regarding this benches i get 95% performance of a 8800gtx for 50% of it's price.