Why AMD-MHz don't equal Intel-MHz?

Ever make this off-the-cuff comment? "AMD is only clocked at 2.8GHz, while Intel is at 4.0GHz! Intel is much faster." Learn why it's not such a good idea to say that in the company of those who know.

Many of us are familiar with standard gaming benchmarks. Whether you're testing Doom 3, Half-Life 2, or Far Cry, most gaming benchmarks are made from the "Quake Timedemo" mold. They run through a sequence of recorded gameplay or simply walk the player through parts of the game, counting frames and time to give you an average frame rate.
This is good for benchmarking graphics cards because it provides repeatable and predictable results. Every time you run the benchmark, the same thing is displayed on screen. Eliminating variables introduced by normal gameplay is a very useful part of performance evaluation. Ideally, you want to eliminate every variable except the one you're trying to test (a graphics card or CPU, for instance), right?

The problem with these gaming benchmarks is that they don't test the true gaming experience during gameplay. When playing back a standard "timedemo" style recorded benchmark, many of the game's systems either don't operate, or function in a controlled, pre-determined fashion. AI, physics, and much of the core game logic are often disabled when playing back recorded benchmark demos. These are CPU-intensive tasks, and removing them from the picture can be useful in graphics benchmarking, but what if you want to see which CPUs perform best in real-world gaming scenarios?


In this feature, we'll be using a popular program called Fraps to measure performance during real gameplay in six different games across multiple genres. We'll look at how the games run faster and slower over time, and get into a bit of a discussion about "how many frames-per-second is enough." The point is to figure out whether Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 processors make for a better gaming platform, and to this end, we'll compare two CPUs that are easy on the checkbook