Q3 and 3dnow optimising makes athlon XP's slower

[Technoid]

<a name="link28430"> <a name="14"><font face=arial size=4><b>Quake 3 V1.32 Athlon XP Optimized dlls <font color=000000 face=Arial size=1>
Reported by: <a href="mailto:chris@amdzone.com">Chris Tom</a>
; At: 6:47 PM

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<font color=000000 face=Arial size=1>Source: <a href=""><font color="359977">e-mail</font></a>
<size=2 color=black face=arial>Aaron Gordon let me know that he has <a href="http://speedycpu.dyndns.org/opt/">released</a> Athlon XP optimized Quake 3 version 1.32 dlls.<p><i>Note to people who think these DLLs are "unfair" in benchmarks. This is horribly incorrect. Quake3 (even with an Athlon XP) forces<br>
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AMD chips to use 3DNow, not SSE. Little do people know the 3DNow! code is completely broken in Quake3. It does not help at ALL.<br>

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The Pentium 3 and 4 chips however are both detected as "Pentium 3" chips, which automatically uses SSE which DOES work in Quake3 <br>
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and gives a significant FPS boost. These DLLs don't enable SSE but do help with Athlons.. and if SSE was to ever be enabled in Quake3 for<br>
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Athlon processors they would blow Pentium 4 chips out of the water even more. In the tests I ran a P4-2.53 @ 3.32GHz, 175/700fsb lost to<br>
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a "stock" Athlon XP 2700+(2166MHz, 166fsb) using these dlls... </i></p><br>

Source : AMDZone

[Jammrock]

Fasinating.

This is why I don't like synthetic benchmarks. If the coder isn't good at optimizing code for a unique instruction set, then the benchmark is skewed. It should be interesting to see benchmarks rerun with these dll's, since the P4 is traditionally the Quake 3 king.

Jammrock

[Technoid]

There are actualy dll's on that page that enables SSE for athlon xp cpu's

[Novdid]

Yeah they seem to give a healthy boost!

[az]

Originally posted by Jammrock
Fasinating.

This is why I don't like synthetic benchmarks. If the coder isn't good at optimizing code for a unique instruction set, then the benchmark is skewed. It should be interesting to see benchmarks rerun with these dll's, since the P4 is traditionally the Quake 3 king.

Jammrock

Yes, but you also have to see that the fastest compilers out there (intel's) already optimize for p4 at stock settings. Of course, AXPs do also profit from that, but of course not as greatly, and AMD can't afford such a kick-ass compiler team as intel can (so they don't even try, which might hurt them for AMD-64).

AZ