Falcon 4.0: Allied Force Part 5 Page 2

By SimHQ on August 5, 2005 in _technology, hide

Benchmark Scores

SimHQ’s Allied Force testing consists of two missions, which are now officially a part of our benchmarking suite. These two tests are titled Test 1: Ground and Test 2: Air.

Based on the Korea map, Ground is a short MUD moving flight that leaves Mandumi, heads over the FLOT, and attacks an enemy supply depot that has way too much AAA and SAM cover. This test is run for six minutes.

The second test, Air, is also based on the Korea map. It is a mission that starts with the threat warning siren blaring as your flight comes under immediate attack by Su-27s, with lots of jinking at angels 20. Air is a shorter mission, running for three minutes.

Readers can download the zipped file containing both mission .tac files here (16 kb).

Test 1: Ground

Not unexpectedly, AMD’s X2 4800+ dual core leads the pack for all recorded frame rates. The 4800+’s lead is 30% higher than the other tested dual core, Intel’s 840, and more than 20% over Intel’s P4 3.73 single-core CPU, which itself managed to outperform the FX-55; one has to wonder if Intel’s hyper-threading is paying dividends with Lead Pursuit’s thread optimizations. Intel’s 840 lags behind all the high-end processors and barely manages to outperform the single-core 3800+, a performance that’s fairly consistent with past Falcon testing. The 2700+ trails significantly behind, though this isn’t unexpected since its test system is considerably outdated compared to the other systems.

The following are frame rate graphs showing the frames per second results from each processor’s testing of the Ground mission as recorded by Fraps.

Test 1: Ground - click to see the full-page chart

Test 2: Air

The Air mission allowed the 4800+ to truly shine, outperforming both the FX-55 and P4 3.73 by 20%. The FX-55 likewise outscored Intel’s P4 3.73, though only by the slightest of margins. The dual core 840, however, lagged behind all the other high-end processors and was even outperformed by the single-core 3800+ by 10%. Not to unduly belabor the point, but this score is quite consistent with Intel’s dual core performance, which simply appears to be unable to overcome the clock speed differences despite the presence of an additional processor core, and simply gets blown out of the water (or, perhaps, we should write sky) by the AMD X2s. Case in point with the Air test: the 4800+ outperformed the 840 by a solid 50%. The 2700+ again came in last, trailing behind the other processors by a considerable margin.

The following are frame rate graphs showing the frames per second results from each processor’s testing of the Ground mission as recorded by Fraps.