Doom 3: CPU Battlegrounds

It can be argued that as much of a GPU hog Doom 3 is, it is just as demanding on your CPU. The recipe to success is much simpler on the CPU side however: Doom 3 needs cache and lots of it.

…AMD owners have much more of a reason to rejoice: the Athlon 64 runs Doom perfectly. It’s almost as if the game was built to run best on an Athlon 64; maybe AMD should invest some marketing dollars in their own "The way it’s meant to be played" campaign. And to make things even better, you don’t even have to have the fastest Athlon 64 to get great performance, even the meager 3000+ manages to offer performance equal to that of Intel’s Extreme Edition Pentium 4 at a much lower cost. The key to AMD’s success is the on-die memory controller; with lower latency memory accesses than the competing Intel solutions, Doom 3 sees system memory as one big cache and drives performance up considerably. It is also the on-die memory controller that makes cache size less of an issue on the Athlon 64, while too small of a cache seems to make or break performance with the Pentium 4.

…In the end, the winner of the final battle is clear: the AMD Athlon 64 is the processor for Doom 3.

Doom 3: CPU Battlegrounds @ Anandtech