WinRAR + Doom 3

Much as the WinRAR + LAME MP3 benchmark, this time around I benchmarked our usual Doom 3 demo while WinRAR ran its endless benchmark loop in the background. The results we see here will be indicative of the kind of performance penalty you can expect to take when running a CPU heavy application such as data compression alongside a game on both single- and dual-core processors.

The Pentium D 820 takes only a measly 8 FPS hit in Doom 3 when running WinRAR in the background. Contrasting that against the 27 FPS hit the single-cored 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 took, we see that the addition of a second core definitely helps in a highly-loaded multi-tasking environment. This is highly encouraging I think for many of us who are interested in reducing the performance hit from multiple tasking alongside high load applications.

TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding + Doom 3

This test is similar in construction as the previous one, except that we run a single-threaded MPEG2 encode as opposed to the WinRAR benchmark.

TMPGEnc causes less of a performance penalty than WinRAR did, on either architecture. This time, the performance penalty was more in the order of 4 FPS on the Pentium D 820. Things are looking better!

Windows Media Encoding + Doom 3

The last of our combination benchmarks aims to simulate an environment where you might possibly want to be encoding and streaming media in real-time to another client, all while playing a game. I encoded and streamed a high-resolution video in 800x600 at 3000 Kbps to two clients on our LAN, while running the standard Doom 3 timedemo.

Amazingly enough, both the Pentium D 820 and underclocked Pentium 4 670 escape completely unscathed here! I'm willing to bet that there is some kind of interaction happening here between Windows Media Encoder and the dual-core/HyperThreading capabilities of the Pentium 4s. Due to these unexplainable results, I'll try to find some time to re-run these benchmarks and attempt to reproduce the numbers.