The results speak for themselves. The average frame rate across all six games for the Athlon 64 system is 61fps, while the Pentium 4 averaged 54fps. That's a 13% difference?not tiny, but not large enough to bowl us over. What is more important, we feel, is how often a game runs slowly enough that you can feel it. This methodology is consistent with the one used by a new performance analysis tool in the works at Intel. We picked arbitrary performance thresholds, but these are numbers based on years of game playing experience. We picked frame rates at which you actually notice an impact on how the game feels, not the absolute minimum required to play and enjoy a game. This is where the Athlon 64 really kicks the Pentium 4 in the teeth. Our P4 system spent almost a third of the time, across all games, beneath our target minimum FPS. The Athlon 64 system, on the other hand, spent only 14% of its time there. This is a difference of a whopping 121%!
Clearly, the results we get from timedemo-style benchmarks in our processor reviews aren't far off the mark. If anything, you could say they're kind to Intel. By focusing on average frame rate in the playback of pre-recorded or scripted demos, we find AMD processors are typically 15-25% faster in gaming scenarios. Focusing on the amount of time spent beneath a minimum FPS threshold makes the situation look far worse for Intel, as they spend more than twice as much time beneath the limit.