With the introduction of ATI’s and Nvidia’s new AIBs, and the lack of a really killer app, other than perhaps Crysis and/or FSX, we really can’t see much difference in the products anymore.
I was asked recently what do gamers look for in a board, and I came up six items:
- Performance per Pixel (dots)—Max res and max performance.
- Performance per Price (dollars)—Max performance per dollar.
- Performance per Pressure (decibels) —Max performance quietly.
- Performance per Package (dimensions)—Max performance in a small form factor
- Performance per Pins (doubling)—Crossfire/SLI.
- Performance per Power (Watts).
Table 1: P3 scores for recently introduced AIBs.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Figure 1: Compound percentage difference of three parameters: Price, Performance, and power—P3.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Not all those parameters can be easily measured or obtained, but three of them can: Performance per pixel, price, and power. But which one is the most important, because they are all in different units of measurement and will have to be scaled? I decided that’s the individual’s choice and so made up a model with them weighted equally.
I generated a table of values, applied a weight to them, multiplied all of them and came up with a score.
Then I normalized the data to the lowest score and generated a chart. The performance data came from our testing using Futuremark’s Vantage and running on the Intel Skulltrail PC.
There was a great temptation to call this the PeddieMark, and play more on the Ps in the parameters, but as you can see I’ve resisted doing that. I’d much rather a useful metric actually used than my name in lights.