Athlon XP/2200+: gaming performance

DirectX 8.x
The fastest Athlon processor (Athlon XP/2200+) is beaten by the 2.53GHz Pentium 4 with PC1066 Rambus memory in MadOnion's 3DMark 2001 test. If PC800 Rambus or DDR266 memory is used, the Athlon XP/2200+ is faster. However, the performance differences among the processors in this test are so small that they won’t be noticeable in practice.

When running the DirectX 8 game Aquanox, the processors obtain almost identical power ratings. Obviously with this game the graphics card -- which is bsed on nVidia’s GeForce3 Ti 500 -- is the limiting factor.

A similar picture is evident with Comanche 4: the performance of the graphics card is more important than that of the processors.

OpenGL
In the Vulpine test, no significant performance difference is discernible between the Athlon XP and the Pentium 4.

The influence of memory is important in the Quake 3 NV15 demo test. Here, the 2.53GHz Pentium 4 with PC1066 Rambus memory takes a clear lead. However, when used with lower-performance DDR266 memory, the Pentium 4/2533 is matched by the Athlon XP/2200+ with DDR333 memory.

In the test with the texture-intensive Quake 3 Quaver demo, a similar picture is evident.