Gaming Applications
It is in gaming applications that the defects in the memory subsystem of the Brisbane-core CPU show up. Contradicting their respective ratings, the new Athlon 64 X2 4800+ is slower than the older Athlon 64 X2 4600+ by about 3-7%.
Besides the two games, we ran two benchmarks based on the Valve Source engine that is expected to be used in the upcoming Half-Life 3 . One benchmark shows the speed of processing the environment physics and the other measures the speed of creating lighting maps.
Notwithstanding their native support for multi-core processors, game engines of the future don抰 seem to differ much in their CPU preferences from today抯 engines.
Video and Audio Encoding
These diagrams don抰 have anything new to tell us. The Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU on the new Brisbane core is a little faster than the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ on average. Note also that the new CPU cannot challenge the Core 2 Duo E6400, although costs more (by about $50, according to the official price-list).
