Dual Core Linux Performance: Two Penguins are Better than One

Gaming Benchmark 1: Heavy Downloading

It's not uncommon for us to fire up BitTorrent and start downloading the next SUSE ISOs (only 8GB per release!). Killing time for the 20 to 30 hour download requires some serious gaming, and Doom3 always wants to be played. Although this is a very similar benchmark to Anand's Doom3 gaming benchmark, we are using a GeForce 6600GT while he uses a 6800 Ultra. The two are not comparable.

Doom3 is running at 1280x1024 with 4xAA and 8xAF on the NVIDIA 1.0-7664 drivers. We first ran this test without the extra baggage from the multi tasking.

Now we re-ran the demo with the steps below:

1. Open FireFox 1.0.4 and load all 5 web pages.
2. Open XMMS and start playing a Nine Inch Nails CD ripped to Ogg
3. Open Thunderbird for news
4. Login to our news server and start downloading headers for our subscribed news groups
5. Load up Doom3 and run timedemo "demo1" - record FPS

Very much like the DVD burning test on the previous page, the dual core systems had no difficulty crunching away at Doom3 while downloading our news headers in the background. The Pentium 4 660 is penalized as much as 16%! Our game play on the dual core machines was actually very solid as well when compared to the Athlon 64 3500+ and the Pentium 640. Constantly during writes to the disk the entire game would almost lock up. The Pentium D 820 did well but its low(er) clock speed assured that it could not out perform the Athlon 64s that do slightly better in this test than Pentiums to begin with.