Athlon 64: 3D performance: Aquamark
When it comes to 3D performance, the CPU is a factor, but the performance of the graphics card and the speed of the AGP bus are also important. The Athlon 64 FX-51´s Nforce 3 platform is still relatively young, and chipset upgrades are likely to improve performance. The same goes for graphics card drivers. Software optimisations can also provide performance improvements -- of course, this is true for Intel too, although more optimisations have already been implemented for this more mature platform.
The new Aquamark 3 benchmark supports Intel´s Hyperthreading technology, as well as DirectX 9. The Athlon 64 FX-51 lags slightly behind the Pentium 4 processors in this test, but the performance gap is hardly significant. To what extent new games will use Hyperthreading remains to be seen.
With the older Aquamark 2.3 test, the Athlon 64 FX-51 is slightly faster than the Intel processors at 1024 by 768. At higher resolutions, however, the Intel processors are pretty much on a par with AMD´s 64-bit chip.
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