| AMD K6-3 450 MHz System
by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson |
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Those in the know will recognize that the test system is slightly inferior in disk I/O, mostly by virtue of CPU utilization which in turn impacts benchmarks slightly. The sound and video subsystems are far more important, however, and I was pleased to see that the K6-3 and PII 400 were astonishingly close in performance where 3dNOW was not a factor. I tested Falcon 4 in the dogfight module with no enemy selected. I ran with the hires switch and with all graphics options configured identically for all tests across both platforms. Maximum realism was selected. I ran Combat Flight Simulator in the Instant Action module with no enemy selected and identical realism and graphics settings on both systems (100% realism.)  At 800x600 on the PII 400, the Banshee produced 41 fps in Falcon 4. On the AMD K6-3 450, the Banshee produced 39 fps. Similarly, at 1024x768 the Banshee scored 33 fps in Combat Flight Simulator on the PII400. On the AMD K6-3 450 the Banshee produced the same 33 fps. Swapping to the G400, CFS at 800x600 registered 47 fps, and at 1024x768 registered 35 fps. 3dNOW or 3d LATER? What the heck is 3dNOW and why aren't developers supporting these instructions more uniformly? Remember MMX? Remember what a profound difference it made to your gaming experience? What? You never saw any difference? MMX was the new instruction set Intel added to its Pentium CPU's to increase multimedia and video performance in software. In fact MMX did make a difference in gaming applications, and that difference translated to an average of 10-15% increase in performance over non MMX applications. The problem was that video hardware had evolved so much that MMX was left in the dust. AMD decided they could do better, and designed their own instruction set to improve performance of their CPUs. In the end, their instruction set was both larger and superior. The problem was that developer support was limited at first, and that support could happen at a number of levels. |
 Nations: Spitfire The first level was the most basic. Microsoft included some 3dNOW support directly in DirectX6. This basic level can also be extended directly to video drivers, however, and Nvidia's latest Detonator driver also includes some support for 3dNOW. Finally, direct support in the software itself has the largest impact, and can range from partial to complete support. Game Performance In spite of rumors that there are still issues with current AMD CPUs and certain simulations, I found performance to be as stable on my PII 400 as on the K6-3 machine. I tested the following simulations:
We here at COMBATSIM.COM™ know that our readers are among the sharpest out there, so we can guess what you are thinking: do ANY of the above listed games directly support AMD's 3dNOW extensions? The answer is "no." In fact we have surveyed game developers with regard to games now in production, and we are still waiting for answers from most of them. But a few have provided information, and here it is! Go to Page Three: I/O and Summary
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