I had a similar experience with my Voodoo 5 in my system fitted with a Pentium II Overdrive. The latest driver for the card that didn’t require SSE caused the system to run terribly, but with an older driver I got the performance I was expecting.

So drivers do indeed make all the difference!!!

Haki - What games were you trying?

It's usually a good idea to use drivers from after a game's release (so the driver potentially has a app profile, tweaks, workarounds for them) but not too long after because the games stop being tested and there can be performance regressions.

That first gen Atom performance is going to be interesting. It's not like any old games or drivers would be tuned for one and it's a lot different than the popular CPUs.

swaaye wrote on 2023-02-22, 15:54:

Haki - What games were you trying?

It's usually a good idea to use drivers from after a game's release (so the driver potentially has a app profile, tweaks, workarounds for them) but not too long after because the games stop being tested and there can be performance regressions.

That first gen Atom performance is going to be interesting. It's not like any old games or drivers would be tuned for one and it's a lot different than the popular CPUs.

I agree! For me, it's fascinating to use and test a CPU that was not designed for gaming. And with the intel atom I get low power consumption too. It was wonderful to see that with the necessary precautions it is possible to play games with it.
And yes, I just realized lately that I need to use period correct drivers with respect to the games I want to play/test.
The games I've tried at the moment are Shogo, Max Payne 2 and Gothic 2. All playable at maximum (or near maximum) details. What amazed me is that if I set the graphics details to minimum to look for the cpu limit, I get between 100 and 200 frames per second with those games. I could hardly believe it given the reputation of the Atom cpu.
I also tried:

3Dmark99: about 6000 points (cpu test: 18000)

3Dmark2000: 5750 points.

Maybe in the future I'll try other games and post the results here

Maybe you could run some old benchmarks that were used in old CPU reviews. That way it would be possible to directly compare.

Give Quake 3 Demo 001 a run.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/557/14

I once thought about getting an Atom D525, but opted for a Via C7D.
I wonder how those relate to this Intel Atom model.

I also have a Atom ITX Board, and it performs absymal with 8400GS.
Even textmode scrolling is weird slow.
Matrox G550 PCI also doesnt work well.
Onboard Graphics is 4-5x times faster in VESA Framebuffer Console.

Intel DP410T Mainboard.

With initial Release a PCI Graphic Card does not even work.
It needs first a BIOS Update.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-02-23, 20:11:

I once thought about getting an Atom D525, but opted for a Via C7D.
I wonder how those relate to this Intel Atom model.

The atom d525 seems to me similar to my d2550, both in terms of configuration and performance. While the Via C7-D, from the benchmarks it seems quite less performing. In the past I had a Via C3 overclocked to 1400mhz. But he seemed to have problems. Even the first win95 games ran badly. While in terms of performance it is given as the equivalent of a Pentium 3 with half the frequency. However, I didn't have enough experience to get the maximum performance out of it. With the C7 however, you might be able to get some good, although I don't know what era of video games it covers.
But consider that both the atom and the C3/C7 not being gaming CPUs, they have inconsistent performance.

matze79 wrote on 2023-02-23, 20:28:

I also have a Atom ITX Board, and it performs absymal with 8400GS. Even textmode scrolling is weird slow. Matrox G550 PCI also d […]
Show full quote

I also have a Atom ITX Board, and it performs absymal with 8400GS.
Even textmode scrolling is weird slow.
Matrox G550 PCI also doesnt work well.
Onboard Graphics is 4-5x times faster in VESA Framebuffer Console.

Intel DP410T Mainboard.

With initial Release a PCI Graphic Card does not even work.
It needs first a BIOS Update.

Yes, these Atoms are difficult to use for gaming and even just for office operations. It takes time to figure out how to use them and get relatively decent performance out of them. And we may not even succeed

I made a mistake and bought a laptop-tablet-thing about 8 years ago with an Atom. I used about a half a dozen times and determined it's pure garbage trying to run Windows 10. I'm not sure what to do with it; I should probably just give it away.

swaaye wrote on 2023-02-23, 19:25:

Maybe you could run some old benchmarks that were used in old CPU reviews. That way it would be possible to directly compare.

Give Quake 3 Demo 001 a run.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/557/14

I did the test you told me with Quake 3 demo001. The result is fluctuating. With the same default settings in the link you posted, the result is:

Most of the time: 110 to 170 fps
Very rarely: 90 to 110 fps and 170 to 210 fps.

Based on the graph in the link, with such fluctuating performance, I think it's hard to chart this Atom cpu

ptr1ck wrote on 2023-02-24, 21:14:

I made a mistake and bought a laptop-tablet-thing about 8 years ago with an Atom. I used about a half a dozen times and determined it's pure garbage trying to run Windows 10. I'm not sure what to do with it; I should probably just give it away.

You're right, the Intel Atom for a classic use of every day, is almost unthinkable. Especially with Windows 10. One has to find some light use of it. Or particular uses, such as for example to test Linux distros, or as a mini server, mini Nas, as an emulator of old game consoles or with dosbox (a nice portable dos gaming station wouldn't be bad at all!).

Haki26 wrote on 2023-02-24, 21:35:

Based on the graph in the link, with such fluctuating performance, I think it's hard to chart this Atom cpu

The fluctuations might be caused by the CPU cores changing clock speed with load and/or by the hyperthreading. It could even be caused by the existence of a second processor in general. SMP was very rare back then and clock speed scaling wasn't on the desktop until Athlon 64 (and then problems began for old games!)

You could try imagecfg to set the executable to one core. Or set affinity in task manager. And disable clock scaling by OS power management perhaps, or BIOS settings, or Throttlestop. I also used a program called SpeedSwitchXP to control Pentium M clock speeds for games.

Haki26 wrote on 2023-02-24, 21:47:

ptr1ck wrote on 2023-02-24, 21:14:

I made a mistake and bought a laptop-tablet-thing about 8 years ago with an Atom. I used about a half a dozen times and determined it's pure garbage trying to run Windows 10. I'm not sure what to do with it; I should probably just give it away.

You're right, the Intel Atom for a classic use of every day, is almost unthinkable. Especially with Windows 10. One has to find some light use of it. Or particular uses, such as for example to test Linux distros, or as a mini server, mini Nas, as an emulator of old game consoles or with dosbox (a nice portable dos gaming station wouldn't be bad at all!).

I may dig it up and look at alternative OS or something to make use of it. I'm not even sure how to get anything reloaded on it. It may take some sort of root access or something. Some sort of Linux distro may be the ticket.

Is there any atom PC or motherboard that is around 2GHz? Not common 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz.

My family and I went through this craze and we threw them out before they outlived their usefulness, Asus netbook died just after 1 year warranty.

This shows how bad Intel left out too much in the Atom even Pentium is better choice if they existed in itx board.

Cheers,

ptr1ck wrote on 2023-02-25, 01:20:

I may dig it up and look at alternative OS or something to make use of it. I'm not even sure how to get anything reloaded on it. It may take some sort of root access or something. Some sort of Linux distro may be the ticket.

I messed around with two Atom N270/ N280 netbooks, Asus eee PC 1000H and 1000HE (2009/2010). They can run windows XP quite well, but the idea of Vista/7 on these slow systems never appealed to me. Newer eee PC models did in fact only supply drivers for Vista/7 (starter?), and are therefor left with a mismatch in hardware versus OS.
What is a slight step up in hardware is the AMD E-350 "brazos" APU with integrated AMD 6310 graphics (2011). That hardware also has drivers for Windows XP, but again it is about the last hardware that has them. For Linux that does not matter of course, actually for Linux it is desirable to have a slighly newer Radeon video chipset with GCN architecture, as to use the linux AMD GPU driver.

PS. I still use these things sometimes, mainly as internet radio or as MP3 player.

swaaye wrote on 2023-02-24, 22:05:

Haki26 wrote on 2023-02-24, 21:35:

Based on the graph in the link, with such fluctuating performance, I think it's hard to chart this Atom cpu

The fluctuations might be caused by the CPU cores changing clock speed with load and/or by the hyperthreading. It could even be caused by the existence of a second processor in general. SMP was very rare back then and clock speed scaling wasn't on the desktop until Athlon 64 (and then problems began for old games!)

You could try imagecfg to set the executable to one core. Or set affinity in task manager. And disable clock scaling by OS power management perhaps, or BIOS settings, or Throttlestop. I also used a program called SpeedSwitchXP to control Pentium M clock speeds for games.

The atom d2550 has 2 cores and 4 threads.
It has no variable frequency (so it can be excluded that it is the culprit of the fluctuating performance).
I was able to remove hyper-threading from the bios. Through task manager I assigned the execution of Quake 3 to only one core.
But the result seems to me to have changed only slightly. Now it seems to focus a little more than before in the 110-170fps range. I don't get better than that. I don't want to say nonsense, but isn't it that since the atom is an unconventional CPU, is it equipped with technologies with unbalanced performance between them? For example, perhaps this cpu has many characteristics comparable to a pentium 4 but then perhaps it has combined an fpu that is not up to the rest of the specifications. And then depending on the different demands that the game makes on the cpu depending on the different game scenario, it causes those performance bumps. More than what a balanced cpu is normally subjected to.
However out of curiosity with active cores and threads I also used the command to make quake 3 take advantage of hyper-threading. Processor usage increased by 5-10%, but performance remained the same.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-02-25, 23:43:

Is there any atom PC or motherboard that is around 2GHz? Not common 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz. […]
Show full quote

Is there any atom PC or motherboard that is around 2GHz? Not common 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz.

My family and I went through this craze and we threw them out before they outlived their usefulness, Asus netbook died just after 1 year warranty.

This shows how bad Intel left out too much in the Atom even Pentium is better choice if they existed in itx board.

Cheers,

The Atom CPU is still used today and has reached relatively very high frequencies and cores. Like the atom c5125 with 2.80ghz and 8 cores.
While of my old series of atoms there is still the d2700 that exceeds 2ghz.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_family-intel_atom

Quake 3 benchmark thread
Quake III Arena Benchmark Thread

FYI, Quake 3 knows nothing about hyper-threading, just SMP and even then it needs to be enabled. For SMP if you see no difference in benchmarks then you are likely CPU or GPU limited. Benchmark at all resolutions with and without SMP.

Here is a comparison of a G450 to a Geforce 2 GTS
GTS is first and a G400 is second
http://www.murc.ws/archive/index.php/t-26822.html

Here is the same with P31ghz @ 1166 with a GF3 TI500
*Different Quake ver and demo
Re: DosFreak All System Specs 1-6-2020

Sorry, I ignorantly thought that smp and hyper-threading were the same thing. Thank you for pointing it out to me. Ok, I'll do more tests!