by Bubba "Masterfung" Wolford

WOW!! Almost 23 FPS in the 800x600 2D cockpit! Outstanding! We have almost reached 26 FPS running at 1024x768! These are y far the best scores ever seen!

Just as we suspected, Falcon 4.0 is so CPU limited, we are still not able to get a stable 30 FPS. I imagine it would take a 1GHz processor to get to over 30 FPS in the PapaDoc benchmark at 800x600.

The Competition

AMD has always been a thorn in the side of Intel. As most simulation buffs know, an AMD K6 processor in Falcon 4.0 is much slower than an equivalent speed Intel processor (even the K6-3 is about 12% slower.) AMD has been fighting against the Celeron, and now against the Pentium III the AMD K6-2 and K6-3 really struggle. So far it looks hopeful that the K7 Athlon will give the Pentium III a real run for its money.

Of course, until we see it run a real CPU hog like Falcon 4, it is hard to tell exactly how well the AMD K7 will really perform in a simulation intensive environment. Since simulations are so Floating Point Unit (FPU) intensive when compared to other games, the only way we will know which CPU is better is to finally test one.

Another issue in comparison to Intel is that AMD CPU's do not overclock. Occasionally someone will get lucky, but the vast majority are stuck with the CPU speed they bought while Intel buyers get a lot of bang for the buck by overclocking. At the moment nothing can compete versus Intel's best and since Intel and AMD are in such a price war, the time to upgrade has never been better!

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A10 in Falcon 4

Conclusion

One of the awkward parts about what we simulation buffs have to suffer is being forced to upgrade much more often than the other genres. Given that at any one point Falcon 4.0 can be calculating over 100,000 objects every second, the demands on a CPU are higher than with any other game.

The CPU is the single most important part of a computer. Without a great CPU your computer is going to run dog slow. No amount of memory or video card or hard drive can save your computer with a slow, weak, CPU.

I think I have demonstrated the power of the new Intel Pentium III. This 550 MHz CPU simply rocks and the numbers prove this to be true. This 550 MHz Intel CPU is here and now and is a tremendous work horse.

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