FX-53 vs. 3.4 EE: VST

Athlon 64 FX-53 vs. Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition – Video Stress Test

Notes

At low-resolutions, the Athlon 64 FX-53 is significantly faster than Intel’s flagship, the Pentium 4 3.4 GHz Extreme Edition. Granted, you wouldn’t expect a gamer to play such a visually engaging game at 800x600, nor would they play at 180 frames per second without either anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, which is why the test at 1600x1200 is more realistic.

Not surprisingly, the high-resolution test shows the FX-53 and Extreme Edition within one frame per second of each other. As you’ll see in some of the following graphs, all of the processors hit a similar wall between around 80 frames per second, indicating that something other than CPU performance is inhibiting frame rate, at least in the Video Stress Test.

Then again, the Stress Test isn’t necessarily representative of actual Half-Life game play, which is why we’ll also check out the Counter-Strike: Source beta.