I'm not going to bore you with any more synthetic benchmarks. Believe me, they were very similar to the Windows 98 results. What I really want to show here is the performance difference between using 1 and 2 processors. I thought about this for a very long time. The most obvious solution would had been to run Quake 3 test in single and dual processor configurations.
But, since it's been done by everybody and their
uncle I wanted something original. I decided to use Quake II crusher timedemo,
in conjunction with VMWare for Windows NT. VMWare is a program that enables you
to run a virtual machine within a host operating system like Windows NT or
Linux. In other words, I was able to install and run Windows 98 inside a Windows
NT window. But what's even better, is the fact that VMWare has
SMP support. I originally intended to run Quake 2 Crusher Timedemo within the
Windows 98 window under NT. A plethora of issues with VMWare which I'm still
trying to resolve prevented me from doing that.
So, I decided to do the next best thing. I was going to run Windows 98 in the background of Windows NT using VMWare, and then run the Quake II Crusher Timedemo under NT in single and dual processor configurations. Here are the results clearly illustrating the performance difference between 1 and 2 processors. Keep in mind that during these tests there was an entire Windows 98 operating system running in the background under Windows NT 4.0.
Test System Configuration
Processor(s): Single/Dual Intel Celeron 333A @ 500Mhz Memory: 64 Megs PC-100 SDRAM Hard Disk Drive: IBM Deskstar 14GXP 10.1 Gig Video Card: 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 AGP Operating System: Windows NT 4.0
What we can clearly see from the above graph is the 20% performance difference between running single and dual processors. There you have it, the performance increase that you will see by using dual processors is about 20%, provided of course that your operating system supports SMP. The awesome thing about this is the fact that even having Windows 98 in the background, Quake II is STILL playable at 640x480 in one or two processors. As you can imagine, if there was a task running under Windows 98 instead of sitting idle, the performance would had been a lot worse. Check out the chart below real quick:
The above chart is the Quake II Crusher Timedemo
under Windows NT without VMWare running in the background. As you can see the
frames per second count is very similar to the result of the two processor
benchmark with VMWare running in the background. I thought that was very
interesting. Basically, it illustrates the fact that under the dual processor
test, Windows NT dedicated almost an entire processor into running the Quake II
Crusher Timedemo.
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