P3 better then P4 at games??

christophicus

I was just thinking. Is t possible that a 1 ghz P3 would be better at playing games then a 1.5 ghz P4 due to the shallow pipeline of a P3 compared to a P4??

Dman_15

Highly possible. the P3 is a far superior architecture to the P4.


Intels new chips (conroe) are practically reverse engineered P3's and the Dothan mobile series (centrino) are also P3's and we know how good they are. Intel dropped the ball to AMD when they brought out the P4 instead of sticking with the P3 architecture. only now are the comming back into the game with what is 7 year old technology

christophicus

Yeah thats the way im thinking. Although do P3's support SSE 2 ??

Dman_15

christophicus wrote:

Yeah thats the way im thinking. Although do P3's support SSE 2 ??

Not afaik, just sse

christophicus

Damn thats probably a reason why P4's may be better. id be very interested to find out which is better for definate though.

Dman_15

http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/CCAM/tualatin(5).htm

about 10% between a 1.2 PIII and a 1.8 P4 according to this

TerrorFirmer

Dman_15 wrote:

http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/CCAM/tualatin(5).htm

about 10% between a 1.2 PIII and a 1.8 P4 according to this

Thats shocking. I knew the earlier p4's were weak but I didn't realise the performance gap between the two was that narrow...

astrofool

It was one of the reasons why Intel held off increasing the core clock of the P3 until long after the P4 was dominant. A p4 1.5ghz was equiv to a p3 1.13ghz, with the p3 often winning. Also remember that the p4 bus was 4 times faster, as well as using faster memory.

However as time went on, and Intel cranked up the clock speed and added new SSE instructions and doubled the bus speed again, as well as adding HT, the P4 finally became a very viable system. Northwood was the best CPU in its day against the Athlon XP. When prescott and athlon 64 launched, the inadequacies of the p4 architecture showed up, and evntually Intel abandoned it in favour of an upgraded P3 design.

SouperComputer

The tutalin core was a whopper chip from Intel. In terms of performance, as others have said, it depends on the exact code you are trying to execute. That said the P3 puts up a good fight in most cases.

There was a class action lawsuit when the P4 was first released due to it effectivly doing less work per clock cycle than the P3, but cost a whole lot more, espcially when RAMBUS came into the equation.

I remember an article a while ago (as in 4 years!) of an overclocked Tutalin running with DDR provding very impressive performance.

zilog_jones

Be warned though, that a lot of PIII motherboards won't officially support Tualitins - there's adaptors around, but I've never tried one myself. Also, Tualitins still go for crazy prices eBay - a 1.2GHz Tualatin will set you back at least €40, and a couple of 1.4GHz sold recently for nearly €70 each!

christophicus

So does that mean if i can get a 1 ghz p3 it ould nearly match the preformance of a 1.5ghz P4 ,which is the minimum for doom 3 i think,so i might be able to play doom 3??

TerrorFirmer

The minimum for Doom 3 is a 1.3 ghz cpu I think, and it can be tweaked around to work on lower, but not an awful lot lower....some forum I was reading about tweaking doom 3 to run on crap spec systems had a guy who got it to run on a 1.2 celeron :eek:

conzy

christophicus wrote:

So does that mean if i can get a 1 ghz p3 it ould nearly match the preformance of a 1.5ghz P4 ,which is the minimum for doom 3 i think,so i might be able to play doom 3??

It wont be pretty.........

Especially if you are planning on ultra low-end PCI graphics.......

<hint>Keep an eye out in the FS section, some S754 systems go for great prices </hint>

DemonOfTheFall

I think some guy had doom 3 running on a voodoo card.

It looked like a cartoon the graphics were so crap

christophicus

conzymaher wrote:

It wont be pretty.........

Especially if you are planning on ultra low-end PCI graphics.......

<hint>Keep an eye out in the FS section, some S754 systems go for great prices </hint>

yeah i know but I havent got a job,which is really pissing me off, and i have no source of income at all,so i cant afford those Rigs in the for sale forum.

zilog_jones

But the price of a 1GHz P3 you could probably get some early Socket A motherboard and a much better Athlon or even Athlon XP - just make sure the motherboard takes SD-RAM, unless you want to buy some DDR-RAM (that's assuming you don't have dreaded Rambus RAM in your current system!).

You won't see a significant different from your current 800MHz PIII and a 1GHz one. I got a PIII-933 a couple of years ago off the 'bay - ended up being about €60-70 after delivery, some thermal paste and a new fan. Anything higher than that seemed significantly more expensive - and this seems true today still. But it made a BIG difference for me as I was previously using a stinky Celeron 366 ^_^

christophicus

lol yeah, Why would I want to get SD ram?? waht are the advantages of ir?? all I know about it is that its more expensive then DDR as i ahve sd ram in my current pc.

zilog_jones

I think you misunderstood. I was saying you could cheaply get an old socket A motherboard that takes SD-RAM (which you already have) and some Athlon instead of getting a socket A motherboard which only takes DDR-RAM - which is better, but you'd need to buy some of course.

christophicus

Ok right i get you. Well at this moment in time I have around €15 so i dont think i can addord to get a new rig. lol

TerrorFirmer

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

I think some guy had doom 3 running on a voodoo card.

It looked like a cartoon the graphics were so crap

I would love to see that.....The last time I saw an actual Voodoo card running was back in the early days of Quake III....what was the last model released? Wasnt there a 128mb Voodoo card released to compete with the geforce cards before they were bought out? I suppose in theory it might be able to run Doom 3...

DemonOfTheFall

No it was some 48 meg or 24 meg voodoo card.

Possibly 2 of them in SLI (The old, 3dfx sli).

I think the probably used some kind of glide wrapper, and he seriously seriously seriously tweaked the doom 3 settings and config files to tone it down.

pretend - edit : Aha! Found the link. It was 2 PCI Voodoo 2s. 12 megs of RAM each.

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1636
http://www.firingsquad.com/media/gallery_index.asp?media_id=244

Impressive stuff.

TerrorFirmer

Thats incredible. Regardless of how bad the graphics are, thats absolutely amazing....do you know if he was getting a playable fps?

Its funny how on those low settings it looks like a Quake II mod or even original half life....I know in this case its an incredible acheivement, but I never got normal people who still insisted on playing new games on ancient hardware at all low settings....defeats the purpose for me!

edit: I see the fps counter in the corner of the screen - some of the screens show up tp 60fps, which is quite surprising. Look at the picture of the torch beam....lol

christophicus

So what are the minimum cpu requirements of BF 2??

DemonOfTheFall

First hit on a google search wrote:

YSTEM REQUIREMENTS

* Windows XP (32-bit) with Admin rights
* 1.7 GHz Intel Celeron D / Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP/ Sempron or greater
* 512 MB of RAM or more
* 8x or faster CD/DVD drive
* 2.3 GB free hard drive space or more
* Video: DirectX 9.0c compatible (see video)
* Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible (Sound Blaster X-Fi series recommended )

VIDEO
Video card must have 128 MB or more memory and one of the following chipsets:

* NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 or greater
* ATI Radeon 8500 or greater

MULTIPLAYER
Multiplayer requires 1 set of discs per PC and a broadband (Cable, DSL, or a faster) connection.Internet or Network (2-64 players).

Some people are just plain lazy...

Creamy Goodness

lol that's one way of getting rid of having to use the flashlight.

just use a really old system.


also don't quote me on this but wasn't there a 128mb version of the voodoo 5?

*EDIT* whoops sorry it was 64mb for the voodoo 5.

christophicus

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

Some people are just plain lazy...

Ive searched for it many a time and its always taken me ages to find so i just thought id ask you guys, Hoping youd know of hand.

Yeah in Cs 1.6 i dont have to use the torch because My pc is so bad that it has to use the software renderer. When i switched to D3D I couldnt see wherei was going and had no idea what was going on.lol

TerrorFirmer

christophicus wrote:

Ive searched for it many a time and its always taken me ages to find so i just thought id ask you guys, Hoping youd know of hand.

Yeah in Cs 1.6 i dont have to use the torch because My pc is so bad that it has to use the software renderer. When i switched to D3D I couldnt see wherei was going and had no idea what was going on.lol

Software Renderer is ok at high res, not the best but decent considering you don't need a 3d card - its unforgivably brutal in low res though.

I remember the days of my friend playing UT competitively online on his 233mhz 64mb ram computer with a 2mb 2d only card. 320x200 on Software renderer or something equally ridiculous. :eek:

christophicus

MY resolution is 800x600 on medium quality and i get around 25 fps.I know ,its increadibly crap.

zilog_jones

Does your PC have an AGP port? You could get a GeForce 2 or something similar second-hand for your €15. You'll benefit soo much more in games from a real graphics card than a 200MHz faster CPU.

Or if you only have PCI slots and want to go for retro-chiqueness, a Voodoo2 - though that'll mean you'll have to stick to CS 1.5 (unless someone's hacked up glide for 1.6?) with dodgy eastern european and chinese servers

TerrorFirmer

That doesnt really sound right for an 800mhz cpu. Are you sure its not something else?

Even on software mode, a 800mhz should be able to run CS on a high enough res with a better framerate then that...

DemonOfTheFall

I remember playing the first UT on 320x200 software render aswell Ah, memories. I'm not sure why I was playing on software render though, I could nearly swear that we had a TNT2 with a 266mhz P2 around that time. Or maybe it was a P1 166mhz with a Matrox mystique which would explain software render...

christophicus

My PC only has pci slots ,no agp slot in it. whiah is fairly annoying.

I have to be honest with you .When i go into properties on my computer its says that the cpu is running at 797 mhz ,which sounds like a weird number.

yeah the framerate is fairly bad,Its jsut about playible though. Should the framerate really be much faster??

DemonOfTheFall

The clock speed will never really be bang on the figure it's meant to be. It's bound to be a little bit off when we're talking about hundreds of millions of oscillations per second. I haven't seen any PCs where the clockspeed was reported exactly right.

TerrorFirmer

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

I could nearly swear that we had a TNT2 with a 266mhz P2 around that time.

I used a Tnt2 for years. Great card at the time. Even at the end of its lifespan it was still running the newer games pretty well....I think it was the longest I ever held onto a card!

zilog_jones

christophicus wrote:

My PC only has pci slots ,no agp slot in it. whiah is fairly annoying.

You'll still benefit from a better graphics card. I have learnt with PIII's though that anything higher than a GeForce 2 is overkill, as at that point the CPU becomes the bottleneck. I have two PIII 933's - one with a GF2 Ti, and one with a GF4 4200 Ti - and the performance difference in games like BF1942 and BFV is apparently non-existant.

Also, they are both reported as "931 MHz"

christophicus

Ok thanks for that piece of info man.