ALi MAGiK 1: The Athlon gets a second DDR platform

Quake III Arena is an extreme example of the memory/FSB bandwidth dependencies that can be seen in most of today’s first person shooters.  It is because of this quality that the AMD 760 DDR platform did so well in the first place, outperforming the KT133 with PC133 SDRAM by over 10%.

The MAGiK 1 is able to provide a performance boost over the KT133, however it’s not as great as what we saw with AMD’s 760.  In fact, the MAGiK 1 is approximately 5% slower than the AMD 760, both with PC2100 DDR SDRAM.

When you drop the FSB and memory bus frequencies (since they run synchronously) down to 100MHz DDR, resulting in PC1600 DDR SDRAM bandwidth figures, the performance of the MAGiK 1 drops down to below that of the KT133 with regular PC133 SDRAM.

Even with further performance optimizations we don’t expect the MAGiK 1 to be able to pull ahead of the AMD 760, however we can say that there is definitely room for improvement as it should be able to at least perform on-par with the AMD solution.

There isn’t anything seriously wrong with ALi’s AGP drivers as the performance at this memory bandwidth limited setting is similar across the board.  If there were major issues with their AGP drivers we would see some evidence here, and while the slightly below average score may be somewhat of an indication it isn’t enough to worry too much.