Following the introduction of anything past an Intel celeron, yes, ofp goes _that_ far back, benchmark numbers are irrelevent. It is a measure of cpu execution speed which is fairy floss territory because
athlons / pentium 4's and celerons all treat cpu cache differently
introduction of Doube Data Rate ram fudges the figures making internal cache *sometimes* worse than using external ram.
cpu speed is so blindingly fast anyway that you spend most of your time waiting around quickly.
The real issues for any sort of benchmark that involves video graphics is how fast things can be rendered and <> transferred. Transfers involve direct memory transfers from the hard disk, vs, fast access to dedicated memory areas. None of which has a single thing to do with the OFP benchmark. At the very best, it is a highly misleading figiure of relative machine performance. But, as most of us know, a machine running a benchmark of 2000 (athlon), *often* beats a pentium 4 at 5000. It doesn't make the athlon better, it makes the benchmark, ridiculous.
In terms of OFP, memory is not an issue either. The sweet spot for ofp, regardless of the quantity of addons used, regardless of whether your mother in law had cornflakes for breakfast on tuesday, is around 312 meg of _dedicated_ ram. The reason why MORE memory is irrelevant is because ofp uses earlier versions of Direct X whose functions dont' exploit larger values. There is
nothing to be gained running ofp in 1meg, versus 300. The direct x rendering will pull from hard disk cache irregardless.
However,
. The more memory you have on your cpu, the better it is for OFP because all those other tasks being run in background are being run in memory, not, in virtual memory.
Whenever and wherever you start getting poor performance out of the ofp engine, the last place to look, is ofp!. It's because you have added something nasty. And typical among these nasties is Norton Antivirus. It serves as an excellent example of, unknown to you, some other task running in the background. You can extend this to all those other shifty little buggers like adobe acrobat upater, even Windows auto update. They kick in, you, kick out.
If you hit performance issues, alt tab out of ofp and hit the three fingered salute (alt-ctl-del) it will bring up your performance dialog. Look at ALL the processes running under YOUR name. You'll see things in there that will surprose you. (Oh DUH, i never knew ICQ was chatting)
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If you want a much, much closer realistic figure of ofp performance, use Kegety's DxDll. And select the fps option (framerate). This will give you a highly accurate and realistic figure of how well frames are being displayed as you play. Figures beyond 25 are excellent, figures around 10 are playable. Anything less is sludge territory.
Finally, there's a wrinkle that no-one can measure. The bis engine will sacrifice AI intelligence to keep the video performance up and smooth. It means that while everything remains oily slick and responsive, the actual AI, the actual nasties trying to shoot you are dumbed down dead, along with your own troops that can't drive a straight line.
The good news is, if this one hit's you randomly, as in , sometimes mission is fierce, soemtimes not. It is a dead giveaway that you have some background task swallowing cpu crunch.
Topic: Benchmark (Read 1169 times)
