Thursday, July 31, 2008

Hardware websites and benchmarks are cheating AMD...

I don't frequent forums much myself anymore but whenever I see people claiming that the benchmarks being used are skewed towards Intel, it really makes my blood boil. That has got to be the most uninformed thing I've ever heard. Yes, there's a huge conspiracy against AMD and all the hardware sites are secretly being paid off by Intel to run "Intel based benchmarks", that's the only reason why Intel beats AMD... ludicrous!
Most software like the MadOnion benchmarks (PCMark, 3DMark) have SSE2 optimization but is that cheating? They also have 3D Now! code written in them too! How about the notorious SysMark2001 with the Windows Media Encoder 7.0 not using AthlonXP's SSE? AMD themselves stated that SysMark 2001 is a valid benchmark, AMD did release a patch to allow Media Encoder 7.0 to use SSE but they liked the original SysMark 2001 because even without using SSE, the Athlon scored well and it showed off the mighty FPU of the Athlon.
Quake III Arena does love the bandwidth available to the Pentium 4, it always has, but that is something which is isolated to that one game. Games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Jedi Knight II which use the Q3 engine don't show the same signs of loving the P4.
Like it or not SSE2 is here to stay, heck Intel even licensed SSE2 to AMD to run in their "Hammer" line of processors!

No comments: