Socket-A Chipset Comparison - April 2001

Professional OpenGL Performance - SPECviewperf

The Advanced Visualizer Viewset of SPECviewperf is a Professional OpenGL performance test that is mainly influenced by wireframe rendering and shading performance according to SPEC's official disclosure of the weighted tests that make up the viewset. 

Out of the top three performers here, the VIA KT133A is the only one not to use DDR SDRAM.  VIA has honestly come a long way from the days of their Socket-7 chipsets or their earliest Slot-1 chipsets where we would constantly criticize their memory performance.  The KT133A is truly a competitive solution and it shows as the only SDRAM solutions in the top 5 positions in the above chart belong to VIA. 

We must give due credit to the AMD 760 chipset as well since it is the highest performer in this test and continues to prove that AMD does know their platform better than any of the third party chipset manufacturers.  The advantage here is under 2%, and in defense of DDR SDRAM as a technology, this isn't the best showcase of what the added memory bandwidth can do.  Unfortunately it seems like it will still be a little while before we can truly provide a consistent example of the usefulness of DDR SDRAM in an Athlon system.

Once again, the MAGiK1 running at the 100MHz FSB provides the lowest performance out of the bunch, in spite of the success of the platform when running at 133/133 DDR.  Again we see that the chipset coupled with PC1600 DDR SDRAM isn't offering performance that is too impressive at all. 

The majority of the DesignReview viewset focuses on a "walkthrough rendering of surfaces," which translates into performance determined by rendering a very high-polygon count scene without as much of a concentration on shading as was the case in the previous benchmark. 

You'll quickly notice that the frame rates are already much lower than before, indicating the presence of a number of bottlenecks that is holding the system back to between 13 and 18 fps.  Granted that in a situation like this there is a greater value placed on accurate rendering than there is on fast rendering, but for our purposes, we'll assume that the rendering done by the GeForce2 Ultra is accurate and we will then focus on the performance aspect. 

Again the top three contenders are the two PC2100 setups, the leading being the AMD 760 solution followed by the MAGiK1, and in a very close third place is the KT133A.  Before we get to the solutions in the middle of it all you'll notice that the three slowest solutions haven't changed at all. 

It is clear by the performance we have seen here and in other tests that the money you save by reusing old PC100 SDRAM on any Athlon platform truly hampers performance to the point where you are wasting the power of the rest of your system.