[AntiSocialKindaGuy]

Besides, I doubt the bottleneck is the chip; far more likely to be the GCard. The chip is more than adequate, because it's got the cache to compensate for smaller bus sizes.

[sc4freak]

True. A 3.0ghz P4 won't bottleneck any Video Card until you get to the X850XT's and 6800 Ultras. 3D shadows are pretty much generated completely using the video card. Actually, I think polygons require more CPU power than usual to render.

[weed_eater]

what i mean is the socket series the AMD XP have shitty buses 266/533 mhz bus which is what would cause a bottleneck if anything, as for polys ARE render in full which casue the problems higher poly counts means that the engine must render vertexs that the camera doesnt see unless it uses vertex clipping which is only used in console games for the most part. having to render all the vertex slows down the engine,

although the sage engine doesnt use 64-bit emulation the video card drivers which process the data do so it does matter if you have a 64 vs 32 bit chip, everything runs as fast or faster on a 64-bit chip.

[mastermind2003]

I believe that other things, such as AI and pathfinding will generally cause problems long before graphics will lag the engine. Also, another prime culprit is alpha blends. If you make an entire model with the possibility to alpha blended, it can cause a severe performance hit. Proclone did some research on this some time ago, with a rather low spec machine, and I believe that alphas were much more system intensive than straight polygons.

[sc4freak]

Originally Posted by weed_eater";p=&quot

what i mean is the socket series the AMD XP have shitty buses 266/533 mhz bus which is what would cause a bottleneck if anything, as for polys ARE render in full which casue the problems higher poly counts means that the engine must render vertexs that the camera doesnt see unless it uses vertex clipping which is only used in console games for the most part. having to render all the vertex slows down the engine,

although the sage engine doesnt use 64-bit emulation the video card drivers which process the data do so it does matter if you have a 64 vs 32 bit chip, everything runs as fast or faster on a 64-bit chip.

You have no idea, do you? Comparisons between the Pentium 4 660 and the Pentium 4 550 show that they perform the same in 32-bit games. In fact, the 660 was shown to be slower than the 550 in some cases. The exception to this would be if you are using Windows XP-64, and somehow found some drivers for it. Then the drivers would utilise 64-bit. Preliminary reports show that 64-bit Windows gives only a few percent increase in speed, which is outweighed by the lack of 64-bit drivers being released.

Also, the Athlon64's speed in games has NOTHING to do with the fact that it can run 64-bit. Games naturally take advantage of high IPC, which the Athlon64 has plenty of. Intel's processors rely on brute-force clock speed, and that is why they are superior at video encoding and are not as effective as Athlon64s in games.

[mastermind2003]

There aren't many people that do. The nitty gritty of how a computer works is still a black art.

[AntiSocialKindaGuy]

Pentium chips are excellent at basic tasks, like unzipping and compiling, which is why I chose one. AMD may be better for games in most instances due to larger bus widths, this gives little to no benefit when its not under stress. And I hate waiting for code compiling ...