| AMD K6-3 450 MHz System
by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson |
||||
|
Robin Heydon at Microprose reports that they are currently looking into 3dNOW support. Carl Norman at SSI reports that they do not currently have plans to support 3dNOW. The producers of Flight Combat say, "no comment," but they will have more information soon. The folks at Wayward Design (B17 II) say that "some" support will be in place. We haven't heard from Janes, Rowan, DI, DiD or SIMIS. Team Apache, however, SIMIS first helo product, contained support for 3dNOW so it is reasonable to assume this has continued with their new engine. Of the other developers, DiD seems the most likely to offer support since their graphic engine is still in development. Disk and I/O: ATA 66 Ultra II SCSI is no longer the only game in town, and in fact while load times for the Falcon4 dogfight module were much longer on the K6-3 system, this has more to do with CPU than with the disk subsystem. When the ATA66 subsystem was moved to the PII 400, load times were only slightly longer than with the Ultra II SCSI system. Video performance was closer across both systems than Disk I/O, which makes sense since the frame rates were almost identical. Since the bus speed is the same on both systems and the CPU clock was higher on the K6-3, there was nearly a match on in game performance. All of which goes toward the question as to how well a simulation would perform where 3dNOW was fully supported. So far as I know, there are not yet any simulations out there which would allow such a test. Sigh. As a result we had to fall back to the Quake 2 Massive 1 demo results. Without 3DNow! support, the K6-3 scored 59.2 frames per second. With 3DNow! activated in the demo the score rose to to 71.1 frames per second.  Yes, the difference is significant. In fact my PII 400 scored only 61.4 frames per second in the same Quake 2 Massive 1 demo. Where 3dNOW support is in place, the K6-3 easily passes the PII 400. Time to lobby for greater support from simulation developers! |
SUMMARY Unfortunately, we know that everyone out there wants the most bang for the buck, and with prices on Intel hardware being at record lows, AMD is up against it. Here is a current listing of CPU prices:
It isn't tough to do the math. A Celeron 400A can easily be clocked to 450, and will usually go to 500. Since our games of choice lack 3dNOW support, why would a gamer choose a 450 MHz K6-3 CPU over the CeleronA? You would be paying more for less performance. The only reason to make such a buy would be 1. in the hope that more 3dNOW support is in the offing; 2) to protest against Intel's monopoly. We leave it to you to decide where you fit. The choice becomes tougher, however, when you realize that you can invest in a Pentium III 450 CPU for the same price as the K6-3 on the street. The PIII is multiplier locked at 4.5, but can usually be clocked to 4.5x 124=558, a huge performance gain over the K6-3 at 450 MHz. Unfortunately, however, the K6-3 cannot be successfully overclocked. We ran the CPU at 500 for a few minutes but it was not stable at that speed. Onward and Upward While the Pentium III offers some forward looking advantages with its new instruction set (SIMD, a great improvement over the old MMX instructions), AMD has also built new instructions into its K7. The question remains, which of our favorite game developers will support the new instructions, and how soon? The answers aren't coming quickly, although a number of developers are currently looking things over. I'll go out on a limb and say we can expect support coming from Wayward Design, Microprose, DiD and a few others, and we may also see support built into DX 7.5 or DX8. Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, S3, Diamond and 3dfx already have support for 3dNOW in their video drivers. The implications are clear. We need to lobby developers for more support for 3dNOW instructions. AMD provides serious competition for Intel, both in prices and innovation. Their success makes the hardware marketplace much better for gamers. I want to see them succeed, and maybe even more, I would love to run a 600MHz K7 machine with the new instructions fully supported in my favorite sims! What is 3DNOW and what does it do? Read our brief 3DNOW Interview.
|
|||
|
Copyright © 1997 - 2000 COMBATSIM.COM, INC. All Rights Reserved. Last Updated June 30th, 1999 |
||||