by Tim "Flyboy" Henderson

  JANE'S World War II Fighters is a fun simulation, especially for online play. It is also one of the more demanding simulations on PCs, with decent flight modeling and stunning graphics, with an emphasis on alpha blending and textures. My average frame rate on my PII 450 in WW2 Fighters at 1024x768 is half what I get in Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator.

I ran WW2 Fighters in 16 bit color, with all graphics options and flight options to the max. From this chart you can see that my frame rate increased around 40% in moving from the Pentium II to the Athlon. The increase was apparent immediately. I was whisked to the Mustang cockpit when I hit FLY NOW and the flight was much smoother. Gotta love it!!

While compatability issues seem to be ancient history for AMD, I threw a bunch of stuff at the Athlon just to be sure. It ran everything without a hitch:

• Combat Flight Simulator
• EAW
• NHL 2000
• NFS 3
• Panzer Elite (beta)
• Panzer General 3d (beta)
• Rogue Spear
• Super Hornet (early beta)
• Total Air War
• Team Apache
• Team Alligator (alpha)
• WW2 Fighters

Click to continue

Panzer Elite

Finally, just for good measure I installed an OEM TNT2 board. My frame rate suffered in both F4 and WW2 Fighters, but everything ran fine. I then updated to DX7 (reluctantly, but gotta keep the Editor happy!) and reran the benchmarks in WW2 Fighters and Falcon 4.0. I had a single crash in WW2 Fighters but F4 was stable- oddly, the frame rate dropped by about 10%. Hopefully that loss will be recovered in a later DX7 release.

SUMMARY

Gentlemen. AMD has arrived, big time! It really does my heart good to see a true competitor for INTEL. It will do my heart even more good when AMD moves to the .18 micron process with copper. Dang, an 800MHz Athlon should make even the most jaded F4 fan happy! (Note: Kryotech has already released an 800MHz Athlon system, so by January we should see the Athlon runnning at 1GHz!)

What will the serious sim crowd with upgrade dollars to burn be buying this Christmas? I heartily recommend the Athlon and can't wait to see how the bi-athlon systems purr.

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