Half-Life 2 as a benchmark
Audio effect on the performance
In this test, we used an external SB Live sound card, and ATI's most powerful video card - X850XT Platinum Edition. Our tests revealed a strong effect sound produces on the benchmarking results. 10 FPS difference is seen at any resolutions in the Canal scenes.
To take the readings, we set the quality to the maximum level, with the AA and AF disabled.
At the same time, we checked the effect of sound in the configuration with the GeForce 6600GT:
The same picture - a heavy load upon the processor.
This implies an evident conclusion - if we test a video card, the sound must be definitely disabled in the game. If we run system tests, it's a good idea to enable the sound.
CPU-boundedness
In this test, we used the "system demo" - trainst-3dnews + 4xAA/8xAF.
The CPU-boundedness starts decreasing at 1280x1024 and stops at 1800x1440! Surprisingly, these results are for the most powerful ever X800XT that offers well advanced image quality settings... Intel's 600 MHz CPU architecture gives a 10 FPS boost within the range of "independence" on the video card.
Effect of the memory bandwidth and capacity
For testing purposes, we tampered with the canonical Intel platform through switching the memory to the single-channel mode 2x512 Mb. In the tests, we used ATI Radeon X700XT with the ÀÀ and AF disabled:
There is dependence, albeit minor.
Now we leave one 512Mb DDR2 module in the system:
Basically, 512 MB is quite enough, the game is not demanding for the modern level of memory capacity. There is a drop, but negligible. The CPU-boundedness is much more serious.
HyperThreading
Oops, what an annoying surprise! The game is very hard on HyperThreading, which is evident from the results. In fact, such examples are not rare - take for instance Comanche 4. In 2005, Intel and probably AMD will release their first dual-core CPUs and they will have to work quite immensely with software developers until the dual-core architecture is able bringing any boost besides the OS operation.
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